THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Ghost Image by Joshua Gilder (Simon & Schuster, 350 pp., $23). Switching careers is always difficult—and moving from just about any other profession to...
...For all of Gilder's talents with the scenery, however, his protagonist never quite seems to come alive...
...Ghost Image is a good piece of popular fiction and its author has a promising literary career ahead of him...
...Stephen Barbara How To Ruin Your Life by Ben Stein (Hay, 110 pp., $12.95...
...At its core, Ghost Image is a medical thriller in the style of Robin Cook...
...That underappreciated gem reminds readers that life changes only when you get up and do something...
...Such poets as Dryden and Pope once strutted their skill by making him speak with an English voice...
...It's a funny and wise collection of old-fashioned advice from the coolest nerd around...
...To continue working on her, he keeps the details of his relationship with Allie hidden— and it's not too much to reveal that these details eventually come out, to his detriment...
...He enters the operating room, begins working, and soon realizes that the patient is his girlfriend: a public-relations bunny named Allie Sorosh who slinks around without underwear, gets into cat fights, and knows every bartender in town...
...It's not clear how much Latin each poet knows, but all know English supremely, and that counts most in the translation of verse: mastery of the language you're going into, not out of...
...This variety might have proven a disadvantage...
...The very humility of this project of artistic communion impresses...
...Gilder gives little evidence as to how or why Maebry fell in love with Allie or why a woman like Allie would ever have been attracted to the nebbishy internist...
...It may be true that great poetry is both too weighty and too delicate to bear the journey of translation, that it can't be translated and remain itself...
...Mer-win, Robert Pinsky, C.K...
...The essays are so well written, and in general so full of color and biographical anecdote, that even the intellectuals Kimball comes out against, like Hegel, survive...
...Gilder, it is very clear, has some more serious literary pretensions to indulge: He includes some philosophical musing and a bit of symbolism, neither of which adds much to the book...
...Ben Stein is conservatism's most enjoyable contradiction: intellectual mega-nerd and Hollywood bon vivant...
...For that, the reader must turn to Kimball's essays collected in Lives of the Mind...
...This book will help initiate—and re-initiate—modern readers to some of the best lyric poetry ever produced...
...McClatchy (Princeton University Press, 312 pp., $24.95...
...His resume is so vast that if you didn't know it was true you'd swear it was ridiculous: a White House speech-writer, movie actor, federal economist, author, screenwriter, game-show host, and the voice of television cartoon characters, and he started it all off as valedictorian of Yale Law School in the middle of the Vietnam War...
...The poetry of Horace leaves an aftertaste at once sweet and bitter...
...Nonetheless, this collection shows that the effort, however unsuccessful at some turns, ennobles...
...It's touching and informative without ever turning schmaltzy...
...The result is thirty-five mini-essays with titles such as "Criticize Early and Often," "Be A Perfectionist," "Think Too Big," and "Whenever Possible, Say 'I Told You So.'" Stein has written a guidebook to success once before, the 1981 Bunkhouse Logic...
...This is what dedicated skill can do when deflected from narcissistic service to the ego...
...The essays on medical ethics in Britain, library administration, and Edmund Burke are interesting, but seem a little off-topic—if the topic is the fact that civilization is quite literally under attack...
...The best evocations come from Anthony Hecht, Donald Hall, Heather McHugh, Richard Howard, W.S...
...In his new book Why the Left Hates America, he provides a compelling, breezy look at the political myopia and downright kookiness that characterizes the radical left on campus, in the media, and in Hollywood...
...Horace was a member of the family...
...Tracy Lee Simmons The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball (Ivan R. Dee, 272 pp., $28.95), and Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse by Roger Kim-ball (Ivan R. Dee, 375 pp., $28.95...
...In his half-humor, half-self-help book How to Ruin Your Life, Stein charts out the path to success by listing just about every bad choice one could make on a trip in the other direction...
...In his new book, Stein takes a humorous tack on the million small habits that taken together define the character and tendencies of successful people...
...Switching careers is always difficult—and moving from just about any other profession to successful novel-writing may be the most difficult of all...
...And it's a standing challenge...
...While it hardly qualifies as high literature, former White House speechwriter Joshua Gilder's first effort—the medical thriller Ghost Image—demonstrates a great deal of commercial and literary promise...
...Although Gilder wrote speeches for President Reagan and served in the State Department under George H.W...
...Michael Long Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness by Daniel J. Flynn (Prima, 272 pp., $23.95...
...Eli Lehrer Horace: The Odes, New Translations by Contemporary Poets, edited by J.D...
...Jackson Maebry gets called to attend a horribly burnt and disfigured young woman...
...His poetry is urbane, sophisticated, and timeless...
...Eli Lehrer...
...Maebry is an unsympathetic, opaque, near-alcoholic who may well have done some terrible things...
...Even such statesmen as Gladstone and John Quincy Adams—back in that lost age of humanely educated politicians— gave the job a stab...
...Short chapters, a fast-moving plot, and a well-drawn supporting cast make this novel a good airplane read...
...Translating Horace is worth any poet's time...
...The book shines when Flynn catalogs the excesses of people who loathe everything the United States has ever touched: He effectively mixes personal anecdote with careful research...
...Kim-ball's writing always shows his fascination with evil, error, and delusion, but this essay—which lumps together terrorists, feminists, and various conceptual artists as barbarians trying to destroy or disillusion our civilization—is not Kimball at his best...
...As executive director of Accuracy in Academia—a conservative group that watches over higher education—Dan Flynn has spent much of his adult life tangling with the radical Left...
...Williams, and Richard Wilbur...
...Thankfully, Gilder writes dialogue much better than Cook does...
...A few of his supporting characters—a Vietnam veteran police detective with an addiction to nasal spray and an alcoholic sculptor who serves as Mae-bry's landlord—are polished gems of careful characterization...
...Why the Left Hates America breaks no new intellectual ground, but it's an interesting look at one of the nation's most twisted political subcultures...
...But one hardly reads books like this for perfection in characterization...
...Befitting the heady material they've been given, the poets hold to fairly strict (though not uniform) poetic forms...
...He's been shouted down, boycotted, and called names...
...But J.D...
...The final chapter, a catalogue of what's good about America, works even better...
...Bush, the novel—set in the Bay Area—offers little of political interest besides some offhand comments about managed care...
...Peter Brandt to patch up Allie's badly scarred body and rebuild her face, the police begin to take an interest in Maebry...
...Some of the quotations he digs up from such luminaries as Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky are almost too bad to be believed...
...The Survival of Culture concludes with a piece by Roger Kimball entitled "The Fortunes of Permanence...
...Two of the essays, one by David Pryce-Jones and another by Keith Windschuttle, are especially insightful...
...McClatchy has doled out his assignments wisely to the finest poets writing in English in England, America, and Ireland, and they've done their work well...
...He can quicken, and slow down, the pulse...
...As he works with his mentor Dr...
...In The Survival of Culture, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball— the editors of the New Criterion—collect ten essays on the fate of Western culture, particularly traditional institutions and morality...
...For readers of Latin, we have Horace's text on each facing page to measure fidelity...
...Allie herself hides a number of secrets, as, for that matter, do most of the book's other major characters...
...What makes this new edition of Horace's Odes invigorating, though, is that the poems are rendered not by one hand, but by the best contemporary poets...
...The tradition of translating Horace into English has over the centuries made the greatest poet of Rome's Golden Age—Virgil's only rival—into an honorary English poet...
...The intention of the book is to hold various intellectuals up to ethical standards, so that figures from Schiller to Kierkegaard are judged in part by their use of their intellectual gifts...
...Where "The Fortunes of Permanence" left one with an impression of intolerance, Lives of the Mind is a work of generous humanity...
...In the book's opening pages, workaholic plastic-surgery resident Dr...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 11
