THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon, 224 pp., $24). Inside Laura Kipnis, there's a talented social satirist screaming to get out. Kipnis's Against...
...Eve Tush.net Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite by Bernard Goldberg (Warner, 310 pp., $26.95...
...Still, it has its own excitement and suspense...
...But there's hope...
...Sulfur has seeped into the water— that's what killed them...
...And you certainly do learn an awful lot about Roman life in a.d...
...When you add in the even more extreme condition of journalism schools—"They love diversity, these academic elites, but have no passion for a diversity of ideas"—things look bleak, indeed...
...But Kipnis falls victim to the same naivete and humorlessness she decries...
...Socialism...
...Goldberg, a former CBS News correspondent, even offers a twelve-step program for their recovery: "And if a twelve-step program can help drunks . . . then why not journalists...
...in the editorial or book or culture sections but . . . on the sports pages, too, where diversity and feminist issues are always being rammed down readers' throats...
...Goldberg believes many journalists are troubled by their newsrooms, although they remain silent to avoid being labeled a "right-wing crazy...
...The book turns on a leak in the impressive aqueduct that supplies a quarter of a million people around the Bay of Naples...
...And Goldberg pities the self-doubting producers at the major networks who allow an important story to be reported only after it's first been mentioned in the New York Times—where "ideology regularly gets shoehorned into places you'd never expect to find it—not just...
...Bernard Goldberg's latest—a lively follow-up to his 2002 surprise bestseller, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News—is aimed at the mainstream journalists still suffering from liberal media bias...
...Kipnis's Against Love attacks contemporary American ideals of love, marriage, sexual fidelity, and family life...
...Her solution...
...There's something to be said about the topics taken up by Against Love, but Kipnis istt thewoman to do it...
...Erin Montgomery Pompeii by Robert Harris (Random House, 278 pp., $24.95...
...But the dead mullets give young Attilius a clue...
...We should be like Sweden, replacing marriage with a social safety net...
...A young engineer, straight arrow Marcus Attilius Primus, must discover the fault before Pompeii runs dry...
...In his work, he runs up against various wealthy and corrupt figures, particularly a former slave who is about to punish one of his own slaves by throwing him into a pond of eels for having let his prized mullets die...
...Cynthia Grenier...
...She apparently sees no need to worry about the fatherless children who won't be satisfied with this substitution...
...Along the way, Kipnis exposes the contradictions in the American view of love—the selfishness we try to disguise as eros: "Leeches and bleeding served a similar purpose in previous models of the body...
...From then on it's a race against time...
...However, we moderns 'express our feelings' in lieu of our fluids, because everyone knows that those who don't are more disease prone, and more subject to cancer, ulcers, or a host of other dire ailments...
...Perhaps now they'll follow Goldberg's lead and break their silence...
...She briefly acknowledges, for instance, the inconvenient fact that women get pregnant: Sex still makes babies, even when we don't want it to...
...Arrogance teems with more examples of reporters at news organizations who pay more attention to being politically correct than reporting the facts...
...Compared with Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 classic The Last Days of Pompeii, with its huge cast of characters and thickly tangled plot, Robert Harris has definitely written Pompeii Lite...
...This book should have been written by Florence King...
...Even though everyone knows what happened to that small Roman town, Harris skillfully builds suspense in tracking the damage to the aqueduct and linking it to the historic eruption...
Vol. 9 • December 2003 • No. 14
