THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief As we go to press, three books by Weekly Standard authors are among the top hundred bestsellers on Amazon.com. Two of them we mentioned a couple of weeks ago:...
...A few years ago, The Weekly Standard ran an essay by Tracy Lee Simmons about Amazon.com...
...Rightly understanding the world and itself, America is capable of projecting strength in real power politics and simultaneously aiming for high moral ends...
...But the appearance of three Weekly Standard books in the top hundred seems worth notice...
...If Michael Kinsley can admit he didn't read the books he was assigned as the judge of a major book prize, it's hard to hold reviewers to the stern, old-fashioned demand that they actually study the book they've been asked to review...
...What responsible president could allow our safety to be compromised this way...
...Moonbeams and Magnolias at the New York Times," he called it...
...Next time, read the damn book...
...In fact they lost $43,000...
...This nation owes the world more than selfinterest, and we have a duty to increase democracy and freedom wherever we can...
...The third is The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (Encounter, 153 pp., $25.95), co-authored by The Weekly Standard's editor William Kristol and the New Republic's Lawrence F. Kaplan...
...Duly armed," The War Over Iraq concludes, "the United States can act to secure its safety and to advance the cause of liberty—^in Baghdad and beyond...
...This isn't something we want to encourage among Kagan, Frum, Kaplan, and Kristol (particularly when my own book of poetry has fallen to be the 480,320th bestseller...
...Among other things, the essay teased authors for Amazon-envy, compulsively comparing every hour their sales ranks with their friends...
...As for her future reviews, his advice is simple...
...The book-discussion website Moby-lives.com deserves credit for promoting the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette column in which Gene Lyons took note of Lowry's errors and peculiar Southern style of writing...
...Two of them we mentioned a couple of weeks ago: The Right Man: The ^^rprise Presidency of George W. Bush by contributing editor David Frum, and Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order by contributing editor Robert Kagan...
...But Kristol and Kaplan don't argue solely from America's own safety...
...It's almost overkill when Lyons observes that McDougal vehemently denies this explanation—portraying the president in her book as a "glib horn-dog who looks awful in jogging shorts...
...The mission begins in Baghdad," Kristol and Kaplan write, "but it does not end there...
...The Times ran a correction about this point on February 2.) Lowry also asserts that the reason McDougal tried to shelter the Clintons was that she was in love with Bill...
...Is this, Lyons asks, supposed to imply that the Clintons made money on Whitewater...
...Lowry wrote, "The future president was governor and the McDougals owned a bank and a savings and loan and were buying and selling land and, like a lot of other people they knew, making money hand over fist...
...Later in her review, Lowry commiserates with McDougal for her felony convictions on obstruction of justice and criminal contempt—of which McDougal was actually acquitted, in the scene that is the climax of The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk...
...Lyons concludes that Lowry "appears to have skimmed the opening chapters for information confirming her own loopy notions about 'girl children from the Deep South'—she's the kind of Professional Southerner who peddles moonbeams to Yankees—then winged it...
...Bottum The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk by Susan McDougal (Carroll & Graf, 336 pp., $25...
...Beth Henary...
...Still, you hate to see a reviewer get caught as badly as Beverly Lowry was with her review in the New York Times of Susan McDougal's memoir The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk...
...The book presents in strong terms the immediate dangers posed by Iraq— and it goes on to point out, in even stronger terms, the global consequences if we do not act against Saddam's tyranny...
...Shall we encourage dictators and terrorists around the world to believe America can be defied and attacked at will...
...Yo, Beverly...
Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 23
