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15 Scathing Book Reviews

History and/or admiring readers ultimately may have been kind to these works -- but these particular reviews sure weren't!

Tina is an Editor at Large for EW

FREEDOM, by Jonathan Franzen ''...a 576-page monument to insignificance.'' — The Atlantic , October 2010

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson ''This is easily one of the worst books I've ever read. And bear in mind that I've read John Grisham.'' — Charleston City Paper , Aug. 13, 2008

BREAKING DAWN, by Stephenie Meyer ''The most devoted readers will no doubt try to make excuses for this botched novel, but Meyer has put a stake through the heart of her own beloved creation.'' — The Washington Post , Aug. 10, 2008

THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown ''The writing is as bad as Brown's admirers have come to expect: imagine Coke gone flat.'' — The Guardian , Sept. 20, 2009

CHRONIC CITY, by Jonathan Lethem Take your pick: The novel is variously described as ''this tedious, overstuffed novel,'' ''an insipid, cartoon version of Manhattan'' ''an irritating bore,'' and ''lame and unsatisfying.'' — The New York Times , Oct. 12, 2009

ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA, by Isabel Allende ''For all the pizzazz of the promotion and the bewitching conceit of the story, Island Beneath the Sea is abysmal.'' — The New Republic , April 28, 2010

DIARY, by Chuck Palahniuk ''Reading this is like being cornered by a dim-witted and semi-belligerent drunk possessed by an idée fixe he keeps reciting over and over again, jabbing your shoulder each time.'' — Salon , Aug. 20, 2003

BRIGHT-SIDED, by Barbara Ehrenreich ''But this short book is also padded with cheap shots, easy examples, research recycled from her earlier books and caustic reportorial stalking.'' — The New York Times , Oct. 11, 2009

TOWARD THE END OF TIME, by John Updike ''It is, of the total 25 Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.'' — The New York Observer , Oct. 12, 1997

SATURDAY, by Ian McEwan '' Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces — brain operations, squash games, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.'' — The New York Review of Books , May 2005

THE WORLD IS FLAT, by Thomas Friedman ''On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horse----.'' — New York Press , April 26, 2005

DIRTY SEXY POLITICS, by Megan McCain ''It is impossible to read Dirty Sexy Politics and come away with the impression that you have read anything other than the completely unedited ramblings of an idiot.'' — The New Ledger , Sept. 13, 2010

BUSH AT WAR, by Bob Woodward ''The book does not try to be objective. It contains shifty untruths from those who collude, and represses basic factual material, gleanable from aides or from the public record, from the side of those who do not. It despises history and, as a partially ironic consequence, is outpaced by the present.'' — The Atlantic , June 2003

FALSE IMPRESSION, by Jeffrey Archer ''Jeffrey Archer poses something of a problem for reviewers. On the one hand, his popularity makes bad notices seem like high-handed snobbery; on the other, novels like this are so unspeakably awful that they elicit nothing short of anger.'' — The Guardian , March 12, 2006

THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER, by A.A. Milne Dorothy Parker, who reviewed for The New Yorker under the nom de plume Constant Reader, dismissed Milne's sugary concoction with the famous line, ''Tonstant Weader fwowed up.'' — The New Yorker , Oct. 20, 1928

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Scathing book reviews

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‘I’d love a scathing review’: novelist Percival Everett on American Fiction and rewriting Huckleberry Finn

His work triumphed at the Oscars, but the Booker-shortlisted author isn’t interested in acclaim. He talks to the Guardian about race, taking on Mark Twain and why there’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir

I t’s 10am on the morning of the Oscars, and Percival Everett is nowhere to be seen. We’re supposed to be meeting at his neighbourhood coffee shop in leafy South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, before he makes his way across the city for the ceremony, which begins its long march towards best picture just after lunch.

American Fiction, the film of his novel Erasure, is nominated for best adapted screenplay, up against Barbie , but tipped to win. The hour went forward last night, but surely he knows that? At 10.25am I WhatsApp him, but the message remains unread. Eventually I call. “Yes, this is Percival Everett. We’re meeting in half an hour?” The clocks, Percival, the clocks. “Ah,” he chuckles, “my fault.” He’s there in a couple of minutes, in khaki pants, grey shirt and a baseball cap, looking as if he has nothing much on today – a man not only in his own world, but his own time. When I ask why his phone didn’t update like they all do now, he says he never looks at it, and raises his wrist to flaunt a distinctively analogue watch. Hasn’t he got quite an important date later? “Oh,” he shrugs, “my wife would’ve made sure I got there on time.” That’s the novelist Danzy Senna, with whom he has two sons, aged 17 and 15.

Despite having lived in LA for more than three decades, Everett, 67, who teaches literature at the University of Southern California, doesn’t see being invited to the Oscars as somehow getting the keys to the city. It’s more like “visiting someone’s garden shed”, he says, a little bizarrely. “I’ll feel ‘Oh that’s a nice lawnmower’ and never go back.” I suggest that’s quite a prosaic image for what lots of people consider to be the most glamorous event in the universe. “I guess that betrays my feelings about glamour.”

Not that he’s ostentatiously professorial, his otherwordliness just a different way of showing off. He genuinely doesn’t seem to care: about the red carpet, accolades, critics. “I don’t go online,” he tells me. No social media? No, and no reviews. Is he not curious to see how others interpret his work? “Oh I do read scholarship – I think I learn stuff from that – but reviews I just never have any interest in.” Is it a case of protecting himself from comments that might sow doubt, or sting? “In fact, I might be interested in a really scathing review.” Why? “It might be fun? That’s gonna be kind of crazy, to be upset about a bad review. Like, what else can you expect in the world? Not everybody is gonna like my shirt.”

Acclaim isn’t a big motivator, then – instead he writes when he gets fascinated by something, which has happened often enough to produce 24 dazzlingly different novels, stories of baseball players, ranchers, mathematicians, cops and philosophising babies. And, despite his output, he finds time for plenty of other interests. Painting is the big one, and we stroll the short distance from the cafe to his studio, a windowless room in a basement complex bedecked with frenetic, abstract canvases, half-squeezed tubes of paint and impasto-slathered palettes. He’s also a skilled woodworker (he recently became obsessed with buying and repairing old mandolins), a jazz musician, and a horse and mule trainer. (Everett once told Bookforum that when he was being hired by USC a member of the faculty saw his name and exclaimed: “The last thing we need is another 50-year-old Brit,” only to be told by the receptionist that the newest professor was in fact a “black cowboy”).

Horses are no longer a part of his life – he combined working on ranches with teaching much earlier in his career – but they taught him some transferable skills. “I don’t get stressed out,” he tells me. “I think that’s from being on horses. You can’t calm down a 1,200-pound animal by getting excited.” That’s handy, because others in his position might be getting a little wound up by their work being judged in the most public way possible in just a few hours time. It’s a big day, no? “I mean, sort of. It’s not my film,” he laughs. “So, I’m excited for the director.”

He means Cord Jefferson , the former journalist who also adapted the novel, and who described showing Everett the movie as “the most frightening screening I did”. The plot differences are relatively minor, though Erasure is more complex, less certain in its conclusions. Both works tell the story of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a writer of abstruse fiction who fumes when he finds his retelling of Aeschylus’s The Persians filed under “African American studies” in a bookstore (“The only thing ostensibly African American [about it] was my jacket photograph”). But his commercial fortunes are transformed when he decides to submit a “ghetto” novel, ramping up the stereotypes to an obscene degree that white liberal editors nevertheless find irresistible.

Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction as a satire of modern publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive? “There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that those were the only ones available.”

On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.” That could be very irritating, of course. But it could also be a dream project. “Well,” Everett considers the point. “It’s like you’re at the office and they say: ‘We need a black person.’ Why? ‘Well, we need diversity in this room, so would you come in here?’ That’s not why you want to be invited.”

In any case, he isn’t feeling proprietorial about American Fiction: “I view it as a different work,” he tells me, though I get the impression he’s making a statement of artistic fact, rather than attempting to distance himself from the production. “I appreciate it as a different work. In spirit it’s much like the novel, but being a film, it’s not as dark.” It could have been worse: he entirely disowned the TV movie of his second book, Walk Me to the Distance. “I never saw it. I read the script, and I didn’t like it. The changes that they made were so grotesque, there was no way to embrace that at all.”

Regardless, more Everett will be coming soon to a screen near you. In 2022 he published The Trees , a genre-busting comedy about lynching, if you can imagine such a thing – part police procedural, part zombie-horror, part solemn testament to the victims of racial murder. It has been optioned for a possible “limited series” and “people are working on it” but he can’t say any more. While not surprising (the novel was shortlisted for the Booker), it will be interesting to see how a big entertainment company deals with the taboo imagery and extensive gore – “Yeah, well that’s their problem!” he laughs.

His new novel, James, is at least as likely to pique the interest of producers – partly because it adapts a cornerstone of American culture, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While I’m teasing him about his lack of interest in Hollywood glitz, I ask if there are any writers he would be starstruck by. “[All] dead,” he replies – but offers up Samuel Butler, Chester Himes and, of course, Mark Twain. What would they talk about in any ethereal meeting? “You know, I’ve thought about that,” he says. “I don’t know if we would say much. We’d probably just talk about the landscape or something. I’d just kind of like to hear what he sees.”

In the meantime, Everett has taken the initiative with Twain’s most famous text, which tells the story of 13-year-old Huck as he navigates the Mississippi River accompanied by an enslaved man, Jim. “It’s kind of a cliche to say how important it is to American letters. It’s the first time that a novel tried to deal with the very centre of the American psyche – and that is race.” There were protest novels about slavery before then, he says, but they were narrower, focused on the institution itself. “Huck Finn, picaresque adventures aside, is really about a young American, representing America, trying to navigate this landscape, and understand how someone – his friend, actually the only father figure in the book – is also property.”

“He’s got this moral conundrum: ‘He belongs to someone and I’m doing something illegal by helping him run, but he’s my friend and a person, and he shouldn’t be a slave.’ There’s nothing more American.” Whereas Twain’s focus is tightly on Huck’s moral universe, Everett tells the other half of the story, making Jim the narrator, restoring his full name, James, and turning him into an erudite intellectual. Characteristically, one of the major plot devices is linguistic. The hokey dialect that, in Twain, renders Jim rustic and unthreatening, is revealed as a feint – a survival mechanism that the slaves use to disguise their real capacities in front of white people. One evening, James sits down in his cabin to teach some of the enslaved children a language lesson. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he explains, the children chanting: “The better they feel, the safer we are.” He asks a little girl to translate, and is reassured when she produces a sentence in amped-up vernacular: “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

Everett’s novels make abundant use of language games, conceits and disquisitions. Erasure contains a passage from Monk’s inpenetrable post-structuralist novel, and snippets of conversations between Wittgenstein and Derrida. This could be off-putting were it not for the fact that they’re often spliced with much more conventional, pacey writing, and many darkly hilarious moments – 2022’s Dr No , for example, mixes head-scratching maths with a lot of wild, Bond-inspired action. James, likewise, combines dreamed visitations from Voltaire and Locke with page-turning jeopardy. Is that kind of juxtaposition a tactic on Everett’s part, a way of licensing the intellectual gymnastics? “I don’t know if I think about it a lot. I think that any kind of intellectual understanding of the world is generated by a physical location in the world.” And by stuff happening? “Yes, by stuff happening.

It’s why I like teaching – because I get to go out into the world and be reminded that there are other people thinking different thoughts. My inclination is to stay at home and never leave. What would I write if I did that?”

L eave he does, though, and one of his more important outposts is an office in the humanities building of the University of Southern California. Unusually for LA, it’s an easy trip by metro from South Pasadena, which is why a lot of professors choose to live there. The day after the Academy Awards, the campus is glorious, its terracotta tiles and pink-brick modernist halls warming in the sun. Everett is running late, but only by a few minutes. He catches me in the lobby and we walk upstairs to a room with a view of the skyscrapers of downtown and, in the distance, the San Gabriel Mountains. American Fiction won its Oscar, and I ask if he got into the spirit of things. “Oh, that was fine. We had fun going, but we don’t need to go to that again.” No parties, then? “We went to the so-called Governors ball, which is in the ballroom right after the event. We could take it for about 10 minutes and we found a way out.”

If Everett sounds ungrateful, or grumpy, he’s not – though he’s in a little pain because of a bad back. No, he’s quick to smile, generous with his time, and simply “not the most extroverted person in the world”. He suspects that, like several of his characters, he’s “on the spectrum”. Today, we’re surrounded by another typically Everettian assortment – a framed photograph of a beloved mule, lots of books and some awards, including one from the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. “Oxymoronic” he jokes, before explaining that, though he grew up in South Carolina, he was born in the neighbouring state. He got out of the south quickly, moving west after his undergraduate degree. “I don’t want to return and live in the south,” he told one interviewer. “I want to see the sun set on the ocean.” But when I suggest he’s no fan of that part of the world, he demurs. “That’s a little unfair. The American inclination is to find a region and blame it so it doesn’t have to feel bad as a whole. There are lots of good people there, and lots of people I’d rather not spend time with. But that’s true of everywhere.”

My attention is drawn to what looks like an elaborate sewing box. “Oh, it’s a fly tying kit.” Is fishing another one of his things? “Yes.” So you make the flies yourself? “Usually while I’m talking to students.” I find it interesting that he likes to distract part of his brain from the task at hand, and it turns out to be something of a theme. James, he says, was written “on the coffee table with Mission: Impossible going the entire time”. What? “Some network would just play the same episodes over and over. It’s just white noise for me.” We’re talking the original 1960s series, by the way, not the movie. “I don’t remember them from being a kid,” he says, and then, for perhaps the first time, becomes really animated: “but the bongo part of the [theme] is fantastic. And that’s really what got me watching. It’s an OK song but the bongo part of it, the percussive part, is incredible – the counting of it. It’s just completely mesmerising.” I’m amazed he can concentrate, but he says: “I don’t really watch. I just know what’s there. And I look up, and my game would be how quickly could I identify the episode. Just from a shot of a hand or anything.” In fact, it makes the writing easier: “It’s a distraction that allows my mind to run instead of trying to … to figure out the story.”

It remains to be seen whether critics will pick up on any subliminally incorporated plotlines from Mission: Impossible in the new book. The reviews for James, published in the US a few weeks ago, are beginning to trickle in. I mention that the Washington Post seemed to like it . “They also told me there was a New York Times review today,” Everett says, without affect. It’s only afterwards that I take a look: it’s a spectacular rave .

We return, briefly, to that Oscar. “Awards are what they are. They don’t make anything better” – unlike bongos, clearly. Being unimpressed by the event is one thing, but this is going to have a concrete effect on his life. The tour he’s about to embark on – “against my better judgment, 12 cities in 13 days” – will doubtless be sold out. There will be more interest in his work, more sales, more scrutiny. And Erasure will potentially define him far more than it did before. Does he worry, given the sheer variety of his writing, about the gravitational pull of that “African American studies” bookshelf – of, ironically, being reduced to the stereotype of “race writer”? “When people come to the work, they get what the work offers. And however you get them there, it’s OK. I don’t much worry about that. If people read anything , I’m happy. It doesn’t even have to be my work. Because if they just become readers, that’s a much better culture.”

“What is it Walt Whitman says in By Blue Ontario’s Shore?” he continues. “I’m paraphrasing, but since it’s Whitman, it doesn’t matter: if you want a better society, produce better people.” (The phrase in the poem is “Produce great Persons, the rest follows.”)

So how do you produce better people? “By helping make them smarter. Education, so they’re interested in ideas. It’d be great if somehow literary fiction could affect popular culture.” But isn’t that precisely what Erasure has done, via American Fiction? “A little bit,” he concedes. “We’ll see”. And with a bemused and friendly laugh, he’s ready to turn his attention to the next thing.

James by Percival Everett is published by Mantle. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2020

"there are no pleasures to be had here, only a reminder of things that once produced pleasure.".

In a year this bruising, this unrelentingly grim, do we really need a list of vicious pans? Doesn’t this exercise in festive schadenfreude, now in its forth year, demean us all? Can’t we just let Woody Allen, Michael Cohen, and Lionel Shriver enjoy the holiday season in peace?

The answers to those very reasonable questions are as follows: yes, no, and no.

We are permitted only one (1) day of abject villainy a year here at Book Marks —a normally kindhearted institution dedicated to helping readers find the books they’ll love by spotlighting the best in contemporary literary criticism—and, by God, we have no intention of wasting it.

Among the tarred and feathered tomes this year: Woody Allen’s exercise in toxic self-exoneration, Ernest Cline’s pop-culture shopping list, and John Bolton’s doorstopper of fatuous braggadocio. (Sadly, Sean Penn did not publish a new Bob Honey novel in 2020 so he will not making his third appearance in a row on this ignoble list. Maybe next year, Sean.)

Here they are, then, for your reading pleasure: 2020’s dirty dozen of diatribes.

Please imbibe responsibly.

“Many readers will be grateful that Woody Allen’s memoir has arrived in a time of face masks and latex gloves. So toxic is the volume that some may be tempted to rinse it in chloroxylenol before placing on a lectern 2m distant … so much of the book is harmless … Was there nobody around to tell 21st-century Woody it’s no longer all right to introduce every female acquaintance with an assessment of her physical charms?… It’s as if he’s writing from the judging panel of a Miss World competition during the Nixon administration … The more general lauding of collaborators has, at least, the virtue of being unintentionally hilarious. Every actor is wonderful. Every technician is a genius … The sense of sub-journalistic carelessness is heightened by a series of weird repetitions … The big questions are knocked back with glib quips. His outrage at the abuse accusations drowns out all other objections … Still, the stuff about his jazz band is nice.”

–Donald Clarke on Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing ( The Irish Times )

“DeLillo’s The Silence  is downright skinny, only 116 pages, with typeface and margins a middle-schooler might use to pad his term paper … The Silence  digresses, and I mean this quite literally, into a series of overlapping, stream-of-consciousness monologues … What makes The Silence  such a letdown is that if the future is coming for us—and it is—it’s DeLillo who I most expected to nail the tenor of how that feels … DeLillo is so obsessed with what his characters might theorize about the disconnecting world that he forgets they might feel some things, too. They’re malfunctioning holograms, sputtering their lines, supposed avatars from the future who fail to pass themselves off as human. ”

–Hillary Kelly on Don DeLillo’s The Silence ( Vulture )

“Woodward’s writing has the mouthfeel of gravel. In Rage , he serves up heaps of that inimitable Woodward prose … He doesn’t do depth. People shuffle in and out of the Oval Office and other rooms of great importance bearing little more than fourth-rate Homeric epithets … A lack of anything remotely resembling literary ability has long been excused on the grounds that Woodward is a first-rate reporter, and first-rate reporters cannot afford the luxury of craftsmanship. The reliance on cliché is a necessity. But nobody wins when we go easy on the Bob Woodwards of this world. Lazy writing is lazy thinking, and lazy thinking is what got us into this whole mess. The greatest achievement of Rage  is that its deadening incoherence is a pretty close approximation of what it has felt like to be in Washington in 2020 . To be perfectly clear, he has no feel for the city itself, or for anyone who doesn’t have a West Wing pass … The senseless drumbeat of news—that Woodward does gets right, page after page … If anything, the chaos should have pushed Woodward to condense, clarify, forge a cohesive story … Need it even be said that the challenge in interviewing Trump is not getting him to talk, but gleaning anything meaningful from the conversation? Credit goes to whoever on Woodward’s ‘team’ figured out how to season a series of nothing-burgers into what looks and smells like filet mignon … Woodward is an access journalist … Such a lack of moral curiosity is especially troubling in our debased times, when the cover of neutrality is daily abused by partisans and charlatans. Only it should not be surprising, for it has marked Woodward’s approach for ages … Rage …is a testament to what Woodward thinks of himself.”

–Alexander Nazaryan on Bob Woodward’s Rage ( The Los Angeles Times )

“The extreme tension in Warhol’s work between meaning and non-meaning has to do with random gestures, accidents, and visual noise carrying as much weight as design. Likewise, a lot that happened in Warhol’s life just sort of happened, the way lots of things happen in every life. This obvious fact, and much else that would occur to most sentient beings, has entirely eluded Blake Gopnik, whose elephantine, ill-written, nearly insensible Warhol has now been unleashed, weighing in at nine hundred pages, any of which suggests nothing so much as an incredibly prolonged, masturbatory trance of graphomania … None of this effort has produced anything resembling a fresh idea. Information that has been available for decades is rolled out as startling news, embedded in a dense lard of fatuous pedantry and vapid generalizations. Gopnik’s writing generally reads like boilerplate cribbed from bygone reviews and magazine articles, recast in a squirmy, sophomoric prose that deadens everything it touches … Gopnik’s ideal reader is someone who has never read a word about Warhol or contemporary art, seen a movie, or formed two consecutive thoughts without assistance … Warhol  would shrink to about twenty pages if he simply stated what happened and left it at that … This book could appear only at a time when the bohemian mobility, sexual freedom, and cultural ferment of New York in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties are not simply being forgotten, as people who were there die off, but becoming unimaginable.”

–Gary Indiana on Blake Gopnik’s Warhol ( Harper’s )

“If there is anything relevant to praise about Ready Player Two , it is how Cline inadvertently nails the inner monologue of entitled, out-of-touch tech moguls, particularly their limited understanding of how human beings actually work, their belief that deep, systematic problems have simple technological solutions, and their conviction that despite all evidence to the contrary, they are a still a hero whose haters would stop them from changing the world for the better. The book’s ostensibly happy ending feels more like a grim twist in a rejected Black Mirror  episode where the characters force their faces into strained, rictus grins while eerie strings play over the credits … It feels almost redundant to say that the rest of the plot feels like a Wikipedia list of ’80s media loosely assembled into a story; that is the point of Ernest Cline’s books … There are no pleasures to be had here, only a reminder of things that once produced pleasure … Nothing about what Ready Player Two  serves up is satisfying, in the same way that reading a shopping list isn’t as satisfying as eating a meal. You will never eat the meal. There is no meal. As with its predecessor, Ready Player Two  will simply come to your table, tell you the names of delicious dishes cooked by other chefs, recite the ingredients they used, and then shake your hand and thank you for coming. This time, you will leave even hungrier, emptier, and poorer for the experience.”

–Laura Hudson on Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two ( Slate )

“ It has all the same clunky, leaden sentences you remember from the first time Twilight  came out in 2005 , and the same bizarre pacing, where nothing really happens until maybe 50 pages from the ending. It has the same insistence that stalking and emotional abuse is romantic, the same casual racism toward Indigenous people, and every other fault that made the franchise a general pop culture punching bag when it was at the height of its cultural saturation 10 years ago … something in this franchise spoke deeply to the hearts of thousands of girls. That something is valuable, and worth a closer look. I can only find traces of it in Midnight Sun … Meyer’s boredom is palpable. She has absolutely no interest in writing about a vampire-on-vampire game of cat-and-mouse through the wilderness … we already saw…Bella’s point of view. And it was sexier and more interesting there. There’s a reason that the first time Stephenie Meyer told this story, she chose to tell it through Bella’s eyes and not Edward’s. Once you get inside Edward’s head, you’re stuck with a serious case of diminishing returns.”

–Constance Grady on Stephanie Meyer’s Midnight Sun ( Vox )

“There are so many instances and varieties of awkward syntax I developed a taxonomy … the writing grows so lumpy and strange it sounds like nonsense poetry. I found myself flinching as I read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives … Cummins has put in the research, as she describes in her afterword, and the scenes on La Bestia are vividly conjured. Still, the book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider. The writer has a strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients of brown skin … The real failures of the book, however, have little to do with the writer’s identity and everything to do with her abilities as a novelist … What thin creations these characters are—and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations. The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous. The children sound like tiny prophets … The tortured sentences aside, American Dirt  is enviably easy to read. It is determinedly apolitical. The deep roots of these forced migrations are never interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable self-reproach. It asks only for us to accept that ‘these people are people,’ while giving us the saintly to root for and the barbarous to deplore—and then congratulating us for caring.”

–Parul Sehgal on Jeaninne Cummins’s American Dirt ( The New York Times )

“The sex scenes are both startling and pedestrian, frank and prim. They’re titillating, like celebrity gossip, and excruciating, like walking in on your parents … The narration is so stilted, so dorky, it inspires fondness … [a] subplot, pitting white feminism against racial justice, feels dutiful, an acknowledgment that no political career could be stainless … characterization feels undermotivated, bloodless—as if anyone would believe that such aspirations are something a person can fall into accidentally, or by some providence, rather than by her own design. This idea of political striving, parked at the intersection of Tracy Flick and Leslie Knope, is possibly endearing and conspicuously small-bore. It refuses to admit anything that might be termed ideology. But perhaps that’s to be expected. More peculiarly, Rodham  lacks drama. In the age of the #Girlboss, when appetite and excess are lauded as feminist ends in themselves, is it possible to make women’s ambition seem not just benign but even inert? … With deft economy, Sittenfeld demonstrates how easy it is to get stuck in even the dumbest traps … But blown up to the scale of professional politics, her fine-grained observations lose resolution. In Rodham , the characters walk around radiating divine simplicity … Bland, faultless equanimity constitutes the book’s dominant tone … The…revisionism just ends up insulting everybody’s intelligence. ”

–Sophia Nguyen on Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham  ( The Nation )

“… a would-be-funny novel were it not so obviously constructed as a platform for Shriver’s ideological positions. All of Shriver’s gripes with the world, about wokeness and political correctness and affirmative action, are in there—tedious long bits relished by the writer but not the reader. In using her characters and circumstances as a launchpad for her invective, Shriver seems to have forgotten a basic rule of fiction writing: the author’s allegiance is to the reader rather than to the authorial self … Behind the faux-bravado, the feckless provocateur, I would bet, is a very frightened woman, scared of losing her money, her entitlement, and her relevance, a Shriver becoming merely shriveled, unable to deliver the authenticity she claims to craves in others … As many fans of the Shriver oeuvre like to reminisce, a New York Times  review of The Mandibles  called her the Cassandra of American Letters.  A more apt, more relevant characterization of Lionel Shriver as she exists today would be the Karen of American Letters,  a disgruntled literary scold who uses her privilege against others who are seen as threats. She brings the I would like to speak with the manager  attitude to the publishing world. Her voice cries out for a return to the days when whiteness was great, its dominance unquestioned.”

–Rafia Zakaria on Lionel Shriver’s The Motion of the Body Through Space ( The Baffler )

“The ‘lost memoir’ of Lou Gehrig is like a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal. It can fortify innocent youths, and it might soothe cranky dyspeptics. But it is bland mush … Some of the worst baseball writing over the past century and a half has trafficked in such sentimentality, casting athletes as exemplars of character. Gehrig’s account is full of such goop … In Gehrig’s defense, he was not writing for posterity … Gaff’s discovery offers a glance at Gehrig as he burst into the American consciousness at the height of the Roaring Twenties … But the memoir offers little insight into Gehrig … Gehrig’s ghostwritten account stays at the surface, coating the sport in myth … In his introduction and biographical essay, Gaff fails to probe how and why ghostwriting journalists crafted these popular columns. Instead he offers unsubstantiated reassurances about the authenticity of Gehrig’s tale … That naive slushiness belongs in the 1920s, not the 2020s.”

–Aram Goudsouzian on Lou Gherig’s The Lost Memoir ( The Washington Post )

“ [A] revolting, contradictory, redundant and transparently faux-penitent memoir … While he does proffer the eye-popping details and anecdotes required in any Trump tell-all, Cohen reveals little about Trump that is not already widely understood. Disloyal  is an exercise in affirmation, not revelation … Cohen revels in how much they share in common, and still channels The Art of the Deal … The book is getting attention for its criticisms of the president. But Disloyal  doubles as Cohen’s unwitting homage to the ways of Donald Trump … The whole thing is written as a lament—but it’s really a lament that it’s over, a lament that he got caught.”

–Carlos Lozada on Michael Cohen’s Disloyal ( The Washington Post )

“… almost five hundred pages of bumptious recitation, fatuous braggadocio, and lame attempts at wit … It’s hard to be cool when you’re John Bolton, and evidently almost as hard not to be outright offensive. This emerges in his painfully maladroit efforts to lend color to a turgid narrative preoccupied with self-flattery and score-settling … Bolton also has an unfortunate penchant for defensive self-justification … Even more trying are his sour, stilted witticisms, some of which he feels compelled to point out are supposed to be funny … He’s (a little) funnier when he caricatures himself by casually playing the curmudgeon … If Bolton has shown a dash of rectitude, he has also revealed a surfeit of blinding egomania.”

–Jonathan Stevenson on John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened ( The New York Review of Books )

Craving more bilious book reviews? Reacquaint yourself with The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2017  ,  2018 , and 2019

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Picture This

George takei 'lost freedom' some 80 years ago – now he's written that story for kids.

Samantha Balaban

George Takei was just 4 years old when when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066:

"I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders... to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded..."

It was Feb. 19, 1942. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor two months earlier; For looking like the enemy, Japanese and Japanese American people in the U.S. were now considered "enemy combatants" and the executive order authorized the government to forcibly remove approximately 125,000 people from their homes and relocate them to prison camps around the country.

Book Reviews

George takei recalls time in an american internment camp in 'they called us enemy'.

Star Trek actor George Takei has written about this time in his life before — once in an autobiography, then in a graphic memoir, and now in his new children's book, My Lost Freedom.

It's about the years he and his mom, dad, brother and baby sister spent in a string of prison camps: swampy Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, desolate Tule Lake in northern California. But first, they were taken from their home, driven to the Santa Anita racetrack and forced to live in horse stalls while the camps were being built.

"The horse stalls were pungent," Takei remembers, "overwhelming with the stench of horse manure. The air was full of flies, buzzing. My mother, I remember, kept mumbling 'So humiliating. So humiliating.'"

He says, "Michelle's drawing really captured the degradation our family was reduced to."

Michelle is Michelle Lee, the illustrator — and researcher — for the book. Lee relied heavily on Takei's text and his excellent memory, but it was the research that both agree really brought the art to life.

"I'm telling it from the perspective of a senior citizen," Takei, 87, laughs. "I really had to wring my brains to try to remember some of the details."

So Takei took Lee to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the board. They had lunch in Little Tokyo, got to know each other, met with the educational director, and looked at the exhibits. Then Lee started digging into the archives.

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From 'star trek' to lgbt spokesman, what it takes 'to be takei'.

"I looked for primary sources that showed what life was like because I feel like that humanizes it a lot more," Lee explains. She found some color photographs taken by Bill Manbo, who had smuggled his camera into the internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. "While I was painting the book, I tried as much to depict George and his family just going about their lives under these really difficult circumstances."

Takei says he was impressed with how Lee managed to capture his parents: his father, the reluctant leader and his mother, a fashion icon in her hats and furs. "This has been the first time that I've had to depict real people," Lee adds.

To get a feel for 1940s fashion, Lee says she looked at old Sears catalogues. "What are people wearing? All the men are wearing suits. What kind of colors were clothes back then."

But a lot of information has also been lost — Lee wasn't able to see, for example, where Takei and his family lived in Arkansas because the barracks at Camp Rohwer have been torn down — there's a museum there now. "I didn't actually come across too many photos of the interior of the barracks," says Lee. "The ones I did come across were very staged."

She did, however, find the original floor plans for the barracks at Jerome Camp, also in Arkansas. "I actually printed the floorplan out and then built up a little model just to see what the space was actually like," Lee says. "I think it just emphasized how small of a space this is that whole families were crammed into."

One illustration in the book shows the work that Takei's mother put in to make that barrack — no more than tar paper and boards stuck together — a home.

"She gathered rags and tore them up into strips and braided them into rugs so that we would be stepping on something warm," Takei remembers. She found army surplus fabrics and sewed curtains for the windows. She took plant branches that had fallen off the nearby trees and made decorative sculptures. She asked a friendly neighbor to build a table and chairs.

"You drew the home that my mother made out of that raw space, Takei tells Lee. "That was wonderful."

Michelle Lee painted the art for My Lost Freedom using watercolor, gouache and colored pencils. Most of the illustrations have a very warm palette, but ever-present are the barbed wire fences and the guard towers. "There's a lot of fencing and bars," Lee explains. "That was kind of the motif that I was using throughout the book... A lot of vertical and horizontal patterns to kind of emphasize just how overbearing it was."

Takei says one of his favorite drawings in the book is a scene of him and his brother, Henry, playing by a culvert.

Asian American And Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2022

George takei got reparations. he says they 'strengthen the integrity of america'.

"Camp Rohwer was a strange and magical place," Takei writes. "We'd never seen trees rising out of murky waters or such colorful butterflies. Our block was surrounded by a drainage ditch, home to tiny, wiggly black fishies. I scooped them up into a jar.

One morning they had funny bumps. Then they lost their tails and their legs popped out. They turned into frogs!"

"They're just two children among many children who were imprisoned at these camps," says Lee, "and to them, perhaps, aspects of being there were just fun." The illustration depicts both childlike wonder and — still, always — a sense of foreboding. Butterflies fly around a barbed wire fence. A bright sun shines on large, dark swamp trees. Kids play in the shadow of a guard tower.

"There's so much that you tell in that one picture," says Takei. "That's the art."

"So many of your memories are of how perceptive you are to things that are going on around you," adds Lee, "but also still approaching things from a child's perspective."

Even though the events in My Lost Freedom took place more than 80 years ago, illustrator Michelle Lee and author George Takei say the story is still very relevant today.

"These themes of displacement and uprooting of communities from one place to another — these are things that are constantly happening," says Lee. Because of war and because of political decisions ... those themes aren't uncommon. They're universal."

Takei agrees. "People need to know the lessons and learn that lesson and apply it to hard times today. And we hope that a lot of people get the book and read it to their children or read it to other children and act on it."

He's done his job, he says, now the readers have their job.

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Challengers

Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his f... Read all Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.

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Victor M. Mukhin was born in 1946 in the town of Orsk, Russia. In 1970 he graduated the Technological Institute in Leningrad. Victor M. Mukhin was directed to work to the scientific-industrial organization "Neorganika" (Elektrostal, Moscow region) where he is working during 47 years, at present as the head of the laboratory of carbon sorbents.     Victor M. Mukhin defended a Ph. D. thesis and a doctoral thesis at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia (in 1979 and 1997 accordingly). Professor of Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Scientific interests: production, investigation and application of active carbons, technological and ecological carbon-adsorptive processes, environmental protection, production of ecologically clean food.   

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Evil Does Not Exist is an eerie, modern-day fable by Oscar-winning director Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Eerie and entrancing in equal measure, this contemporary sylvan fable from Ryusuke Hamaguchi is one of the most deceptively beautiful movies of the year so far.

Its glacial, near-wordless opening act documents the routines of Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower keenly attuned to a lifestyle of quiet subsistence. In the icy mountains surrounding Mizubiki (a fictional Japanese village that's driving distance from Tokyo), Takumi spends his days chopping wood for his hearth and gathering crystalline spring water for the local udon shop.

Hamaguchi's depiction of this picture-book idyll gently unravels: first, with the distant gunshots of unseen deer hunters; second, with the realisation that Takumi's forgotten to pick up his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) from school again.

The film's story soon comes into focus with the announcement of a more pressing existential threat: the creation of a glamping site in Mizubiki for nearby city-slickers.

While the set-up suggests a familiar David-versus-Goliath battle across city lines and class divisions, the resulting social drama fractures into a series of unexpected, increasingly precarious turns – all culminating in a disquieting finale that evades straightforward interpretation.

At the centre of Evil Does Not Exist is an extended community meeting between the village's inhabitants and two representatives of the proposed development, Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani; Happy Hour) and Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka). In a brief dig at showbiz, it's revealed that both are employees of a talent agency whose boss is looking to cash in on a pandemic subsidy; needless to say, they're in embarrassingly over their heads.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films share a keenly observational quality. His previous feature, Drive My Car (which took home best international feature film in 2022 and earned the very first best picture nomination for a Japanese film among its four Oscar nominations), follows another quietly grieving widower who directs a production of Uncle Vanya.

The auditions and rehearsals in the film are played out with a documentary-like attention to procedure that often recalled Louis Malle's recording of Vanya on 42nd Street.

The community meeting in Evil Does Not Exist has a similar effect in its unfussy filming, which employs longer takes and minimal camera movement — though the spectacle of Mizubiki's inhabitants excoriating the agency's ill-conceived plans crosses over into cringe comedy.

Beyond the inherent contradiction of conducting a serious dialogue about glamping – a deeply unattractive portmanteau with no Japanese equivalent – the session sees arguments erupt over fire risks, promises of boosting the local economy, and the amount of sewage that should be allowed to pollute a town's fresh water supply.

While there's more than a tinge of schadenfreude to the near-ritualistic humiliation of the representatives, it's undercut by a disheartening inevitability. Impassioned pleas are stonewalled by feeble pledges to take feedback on board; the conversation is all but a formality.

The film isn't unsympathetic to Mayuzumi and Takahashi, though, whose actions drive the film's second half. Hamaguchi understands that his audience's perspective (as well as his own) is better reflected by the hapless urbanite reps than a self-sufficient survivalist like Takumi.

Evil Does Not Exist can be funny in the director's signature offhand manner – a quality evoked from the title itself – and its commentary is made stronger by his resistance to caricature. Even its most overt antagonist, a team project leader fluent in corporate speak who's glimpsed calling into a Google Hangout from his car, is presented with a scathing accuracy.

As the film progresses, concerns over the immediate threat posed by the agency are eclipsed by a troubled reflection on Mizubiki's delicate ecosystem. The camera lingers on the mountain's suffocating vastness, its rotting animal corpses and its piercing thorns, lacing the lush imagery with a subtle but unmistakeable menace; the methodical pacing gradually oozes with dread.

Evil Does Not Exist was initially conceived as a visual accompaniment to a live performance by musician Eiko Ishibashi so, unsurprisingly, her music is intrinsic to the film's uniquely haunting tone. Initially recalling the sonorous string compositions of Max Richter, the score descends into jarring dissonance and incorporates sparse electronic sounds. Just as important to the score is the film's sudden, razor-sharp cuts, which mercilessly disrupt its lull.

At times, the film recalls The Curse, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's recent Paramount+ miniseries. Despite being completely different in tone, both narratives of class warfare, guilt and a perversion of the natural world are approached with a refreshing strangeness. Such themes have become rocket fuel for the recent cultural landscape, yet rarely is this material allowed to feel genuinely, menacingly abstract.

It's hard to imagine that Evil Does Not Exist will attain the status of Hamaguchi's previous Oscar darling film – which is precisely what makes the film so exciting. It's a daring creative pivot that spells out a rich future for the director.

But for all its surprises and enigmas, it's not an inaccessible film. Audiences who let themselves submit to its irresistible, hypnotic rhythms will be rewarded by a film that inspires genuine contemplation, however troubling its conclusions may be.

Evil Does Not Exist is in cinemas now.

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The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2022

"reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo".

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‘Tis the season for schadenfreude. Yes, for the sixth year running, we’ve emerged from the bowels of the book review mines trailing behind us an oozing sack of pans—each one riper and more wince-inducing that the last.

Among the books being gored and devoured by feral hogs this year: Jared Kushner’s soulless work of sycophancy, John Boyne’s shameless sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas , and Hanya Yanighara’s “anti-accomplishment” doorstopper.

So here they are, in their fabulously festering fulsomeness: the most scathing book reviews of 2022.

“It’s a title that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents … He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law … Breaking History is an earnest and soulless—Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one—and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership … This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes … Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo … The tone is college admissions essay … Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum … A therapist might call these cries for help … The bulk of Breaking History —at nearly 500 pages, it’s a slog—goes deeply into the weeds … What a queasy-making book to have in your hands.”

–Dwight Garner on Jared Kushner’s Breaking History: A White House Memoir ( The New York Times )

“ The Philosophy of Modern Song is a mouthful, a phrase that puts on airs. It asserts that the book is an important work, a tome that merits a place on your loftiest library shelf, up in the thin air where you keep the leather-bound, gilt-edged stuff … But the title is also a wisecrack, too puffed up and self-important to be taken at face value … As a work of prose, The Philosophy of Modern Song is relentless. It rip-snorts along, charging from song to song, idea to idea. Dylan can write what journalists call a great lede: a first sentence that detonates like a hand grenade … What does all this add up to? Not quite a philosophy of modern song, or at least not a coherent one. But coherence isn’t what you want from Bob Dylan … You have to plow through 46 chapters before encountering a song by a female artist … Yet women loom large in his consciousness and are omnipresent in his pages—appearing in such monstrous form, evoked in language so marinated in misogyny, that, reading The Philosophy of Modern Song, I began to feel like a therapist, sneaking glances at my watch while the crackpot on the couch blurts one creepy fantasy after another … It’s a bummer, to put it mildly, to find a Nobel laureate…mixing metaphors and spouting nonsense like an elderly uncle who bulk-emails links to Fox News segments.”

–Jody Rosen on Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song ( The Los Angeles Times )

“ Moshfegh’s own sacraments involve a different orifice, so you will forgive her if her search has led her up her own ass … At first glance, Lapvona is the most disgusting thing Moshfegh has ever written…Yet Moshfegh’s trusty razor can feel oddly blunted in Lapvona . In part, her characteristic incisiveness is dulled by her decision to forgo the first person, in favor of more than a dozen centers of consciousness. This diminishment is also a curious effect of Lapvona itself … Lapvona is the clearest indication yet that the desired effect of Moshfegh’s fiction is not shock but sympathy. Like Hamlet, she must be cruel in order to be kind. Her protagonists are gross and abrasive because they have already begun to molt; peel back their blistering misanthropy and you will find lonely, sensitive people who are in this world but not of it, desperate to transform, ascend, escape … This is the problem with writing to wake people up: Your ideal reader is inevitably asleep. Even if such readers exist, there is no reason to write books for them—not because novels are for the elite but because the first assumption of every novel must be that the reader will infinitely exceed it. Fear of the reader, not of God, is the beginning of literature. Deep down, Moshfegh knows this….Yet the novelist continues to write as if her readers are fundamentally beneath her; as if they, unlike her, have never stopped to consider that the world may be bullshit; as if they must be steered, tricked, or cajoled into knowledge by those whom the universe has seen fit to appoint as their shepherds … It’s a shame. Moshfegh dirt is good dirt. But the author of Lapvona is not an iconoclast; she is a nun. Behind the carefully cultivated persona of arrogant genius, past the disgusting pleasures of her fiction and bland heresies of her politics, wedged just above her not inconsiderable talent, there sits a small, hardened lump of piety. She may truly be a great American novelist one day, if only she learns to be less important. Until then, Moshfegh remains a servant of the highest god there is: herself.”

–Andrea Long Chu on Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona ( Vulture )

“Reading it is like immersive theatre: one of those elaborate warehouse productions where you stumble about from tableau to tableau, trying to piece the story together … The novel is long on atmosphere and short on sense. There are slick, movie-style conversations with a private investigator, a Vietnam vet, and a trans woman; long lunches with a garrulous criminal friend; flashbacks to Alicia’s hallucinations; the obligatory bit of survivalism (would it even be a McCarthy novel without an episode involving tinned foods and roadkill?) … James Joyce is invoked. An oblique reminder that great literature requires hard work? But McCarthy’s difficulty is perverse. The decision to open The Passenger with an impenetrable conversation between Alicia and her hallucinations; the quantum mechanics; the pinball structure; the confusing dialogue—all this just makes the novel hard to read. Nothing meaningful is gained. It’s a shame because at times these books are more interesting than McCarthy’s key works … We think these books are unflinching. Really, they are kitsch: McCarthy’s is an art of exaggeration. A con trick is being practised … That’s how you garner comparisons to Hemingway and Faulkner—when, in fact, you’re a mediocre hybrid of both .”

–Claire Lowdon on Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger ( The Sunday Times )

“With his latest treacly tome  All the Broken Places— complete with title so maudlin it preempts all mockery—Boyne has gifted us with a Holocaust novel so self-indulgent, so grossly stereotyped, so shameless and insipid that one is almost astonished that he has dared … This is not literature. As a grown-up sequel to children’s trash,  All the Broken Places  serves two roles. First, to demonstrate that Boyne definitely did not think that the Germans were innocent, definitely knew they were ‘complicit’ and ‘guilty’ and that history is ‘complicated,’ etc, thanks very much. Second, to serve as a sort of fan fiction for those peculiar adults who long for the comfort of a childhood favorite. As to this first goal, at least, it is a consummate failure, a wildly simplified narrative that misrepresents the extent of Nazi ideology. As in  The Boy in the Striped  Pajamas , Boyne underestimates the family’s awareness of the Holocaust, lending his German characters an exaggerated naivety, or implausible deniability … Boyne flaunts a teenager’s understanding of the causes and consequences of the Second World War … As with so much Holocaust fiction  All the Broken Places  utterly fails in its stated purpose: making the next generation slightly less likely to participate in the next genocide…Boyne’s reduction of Nazi ideology to a fringe belief, expressed in infrequent outbursts—’those filthy Jews’—is all the more absurd now that he’s writing for grown-ups … We don’t need anyone to teach us how to recognize the barefaced devil; the danger is the insidious and gradual creep of violence into the civilised and everyday. This is what the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s dictum—’To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’—warned of: art unable to recognise the break the Holocaust represented with the past, afraid to apprehend the failure of the civilising project. With this childish drivel in which the villains and victims come labelled and sorted, Boyne yet again seems immune to its lessons.”

–Ann Manov on John Boyne’s All the Broken Places ( The New Statesman )

“99 years old, but still, still pushing out the kind of platitudes that not only can be used to excuse the most evil people in the history of the species but that are designed to do exactly that…This rhetoric-as-strategy is obvious right from this book’s cast of characters…A reader might first wonder what Konrad Adenauer is doing drawn among these heartless hinds, but eyebrows might raise at de Gaulle and even Sadat as well…A moment’s thought reveals the beady-eyed rationale behind this grouping; it’s not to pull down good men, it’s to raise up genuine fire-eyed black-pelted yellow-fanged monsters…Henry Kissinger might not be able to climb a flight of stairs anymore, but he’s still capable of telling a lie before he’s even finished his Table of Contents…As he’s winding up this ghastly, conscienceless book, Kissinger contentedly admits that his subjects weren’t always popular…Not everyone admired them or ‘subscribed to their policies’…Sometimes, in fact, they faced resistance, and their separate memories still sometimes face such resistance…Almost like there might be debate about their legacies, or something… Leadership might very well be Kissinger’s most mandarin-hateful book, even surpassing 2014’s truly odious World Power … It’s his 19th book…Here’s hoping it’s his last. ”

–Steve Donoghue on Henry Kissinger’s Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy  ( Open Letters Review )

“ To Paradise is so unusually terrible that it is a sort of anti-accomplishment, the rare book that manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s tale with near unreadable feats of convolution . It is too juvenile to attract serious adult readers and too obtuse to aspire to popular appeal. If A Little Life dragged and self-dramatized, at least it did so via a welter of readily legible, melodramatic thrills. But soap opera fanatics will fare no better with To Paradise ’s contortions than will seasoned belletrists. There is nothing to recommend it to anyone. As I trudged through the novel’s 700 pages, I found myself nostalgic for books plagued only by quaint defects, such as confusing descriptions and characters who behave inconsistently – not that Yanagihara, who has a special gift for garbled metaphors and bizarrely specific yet impenetrable imagery, spares us such infelicities … it is hard to summon the will to enumerate To Paradise ’s thematic or even stylistic shortcomings, for its basic construction is so irretrievably botched as to eclipse the rest of its defects. The fundamental problem is simple and devastating: the book does not make any sense … Aside from its sheer incoherence, its most notable feature is only its punishing length. On and on it goes, sprouting new subplots, amassing new contrivances. Anyone must have a brain of stone to finish it without shedding tears of relief.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise ( Times Literary Supplement )

“Viral success has emboldened [Taddeo] to abandon everything patient and methodical in her investigation of women’s darker appetites in favour of the literary equivalent of chasing clicks … Ghost Lover is a nine-course tasting menu that is all spice and no flavour … The main dish is always the same facile serving of female jealousy. In every effortfully flippant tale, self-conscious women compete to be the most desirable female in the room … At least the proper nouns denote actual things. When Taddeo attempts metaphor, we run into more serious trouble … Throughout, Taddeo rams words together in unexpected ways. ‘His voice turned throaty, filled with wetness and trees.’ Trees? … Perhaps Taddeo has read Lolita and feels excited about experimenting with the English language. Only it feels more as if she has done the experimenting in another tongue, Finnish or Swahili, perhaps, then run a series of untranslatable local sayings through Google Translate … In the course of producing this Goop noir, Taddeo has abandoned any interest in women as complex, conflicted humans. Her characters are myopically focused on blow-dries, blow jobs and brow tints … Inspires depression.”

–Johanna Thomas-Corr on Lisa Taddeo’s Ghost Lover ( The Sunday Times )

“ Everything in Lessons , whose story concludes within a year and a half of its publication date, gives the impression of having been written in extreme haste . Its prose, for example, is pocked with first-order clichés, second-order clichés, dull metaphors, mixed metaphors, limp similes, oxymorons, pleonasms, catachresis, jejune diction, trivializing double entendres, pomposities, flagrant abuse of self-reflexive questions, and barely-concealed cribbings from more talented stylists like Nabokov … Within the first fifty or so pages, Roland experiences no fewer than three portentous epiphanies, none of which turn out to have any bearing on the subsequent four hundred, as though they were narrative coupons McEwan cut out but forgot to cash in … McEwan’s novel is not so much an epic as it is three novellas in a trench coat … If this all sounds pat, it has less to do with the necessary evil that is plot summary in book reviewing, than to the didacticism with which McEwan imparts these and other praecepta in the novel itself. Yet perhaps worse than the way the book comes pre-interpreted for the reader is the way it comes pre-criticized … The trench coat is History. Draped loosely from the backs of these three narratives are hundreds of named political and cultural events, persons, and phenomena, starting with Dunkirk and ending with the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which range from the genuinely consequential to the merely newsworthy to the unmentionably trivial.”

–Ryan Ruby on Ian McEwan’s Lessons ( The New Left Review )

“There is a good, though not excellent, short story hidden somewhere in the four hundred pages of A. M. Homes’s The Unfolding … But on balance, The Unfolding is depressingly shallow, arriving too late and with too little intelligence, humor, wit, or insight to be useful or entertaining … The plot is simple … The structure—dilating and contracting across a narrow band of time—works best in subtly paralleling personal and familial breakdowns with national upheaval, but at its worst, the form makes this novel feel interminable … Homes is dedicated to the idea of these men as so pickled by their own vice and privilege that there’s not an intelligent thought to be found among them. They remain static in their grumbling and their vague schemes, which prevents the irony from deepening or sharpening its critique. What ought to be a central driver of the plot or the evolution of the novel’s themes becomes an inert gimmick … Homes trades away her characters’ convictions and depth for attempted comedic effect. No contrast. No pathos. These men are hollow, which makes the story itself hollow … Homes for some reason describes any surface or object that comes into contact with her characters as though she were writing about the contours of the human soul. Do we need to know what the taxi seats feel like? … I was bored by this book. By its lazy stances, its lax politics, and its rote writing.”

–Brandon Taylor on A. M. Holmes’ The Unfolding ( 4Columns )

“The institutional tone in 21st-century humor is unequipped to deal with anything that matters. In Happy-Go-Lucky , his new collection of essays about the pandemic, aging, and the slow but inevitable death of his father, David Sedaris simultaneously asserts himself as the undisputed past master of this tone and captures its fundamental weakness, applying the style he has developed for the last 30 years to a subject matter for which it is almost eerily unsuited … It is ironic, then, that relatability also turns out to be the absolute bête fucking noire of this collection, cropping up again and again to recast Sedaris not as the antsy everyman we grew up with but rather as some kind of moneyed Aspergers case … For a different author, that would be comedy gold—or at least a bracing opportunity to try something new, to go somewhere more vulnerable and potentially less funny, but also maybe incisive and bittersweet in a way that made the late-life output of funny writers like Twain and Joan Didion so paradoxically invigorating. But Sedaris can’t seem to do it. Either he doesn’t have enough tools in the box or he just refuses to look too closely at any of these understandably difficult subjects, so instead he writes about them in the same tone he used to write about department-store Santas and being bad at French, with disastrously jarring results … Sedaris is like the social director running around the deck of a listing cruise ship, frantically playing for laughs and doing jazz hands while the reader wonders whether he doesn’t know the ship is sinking or just refuses to acknowledge what’s going on … A man with a dozen houses confronts death, the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and broad cultural changes that he cannot fully understand. ‘Ha ha!’ he says. It sounds just like a laugh, just like it always has, except it does not sound true.”

–Dan Brooks on David Sedaris’ Happy-Go-Lucky ( Gawker )

“Even if you’re unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, you’ll suspect what’s coming … Tone above all distinguishes Hamid from these precursors. Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit. The novel is that wan 21st-century banality, a ‘meditation,’ and it meditates on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel. Mostly sad, as it turns out … The sex improves; the prose does not … The novel evinces the worst of Hamid’s style … As in his earlier novels about social mobility and immigration, romance supplies the plot and casts an aura of ‘love’ over the politico-speculative gimmick … This is the novel’s cure for white despair over the loss of whiteness: Keep calm and carry on … What exactly is being born—or rather, borne? Darkness in The Last White Man is an ordeal. Those who were already dark have little presence and no internal life in the novel … If Hamid’s novel were a self-aware satire of this ideology of whiteness and its violent effects, it would be pitch-perfect. But The Last White Man ’s structure affords us no way to know if this is what Hamid intends: It includes no higher judgment, no specific history, no novelistic frame against which to measure the reliability of the narration, no backdrop across which irony can dance … The Last White Man feels like a primer for mourning whiteness, not a critique of it … It’s one thing for a character to be afflicted with blurred vision or the race ‘blindness’ that grants Oona a ‘new kind of sight’; it’s another for the novel to suffer the same confusion of perspective.”

–Namwali Serpell on Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man ( The Atlantic )

“… surely the nastiest Trump administration memoir yet, and possibly, given Conway’s track record, the most flagrantly dishonest … in 500 pages packed with more score-settling than a Quentin Tarantino movie, Conway gives free rein to her contempt for Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Brad Parscale, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and countless other unnamed male Trump staffers … let no one call this book meticulously edited … When she can’t confuse a discussion with arguments as tangled as a pailful of eels, Conway simply avoids it … feels most alive when she’s seething at the ‘overrated, underachieving men who had ridiculed and dismissed me for years’ … can be read as the delusional account of a woman blind to the shortcomings of the powerful man who gave her a shot. But it can also be read—will be read, by those who matter—as an advertisement for her own consultancy business. She’s such a skilled prevaricator that I found myself wondering if she really hates all those male GOP consultants so virulently—or is she just taking out the competition? Furthermore, the ease with which she burns her bridges with Kushner while buttering up her one-time client Mike Pence make clear who she thinks her party’s next candidate will be. Only a fool would trust her, but only a bigger fool would write her off.”

–Laura Miller on Kellyanne Conway’s Here’s the Deal: A Memoir ( Slate )

“ John Irving’s 15th novel is 11 shy of 900 pages long. And boy, did I feel every one of those pages … a baffling amount of weak literary explication and juvenile political opining … The most notably shoehorned element (and there are many, including the ghosts that irritatingly scamper throughout) is the inclusion of excerpts of Adam’s film script—so unnecessary and ill-advised in this already flabby book, it’s difficult not to wonder if this might have been a rejected love-project of Irving’s … The truly discomfiting aspect of this book, though, has to be the hyper-sexualisation of the female characters therein. Early on, a young woman’s loud orgasm is described or referenced, by my count, 16 times. Yes, Irving could argue that this is told from a teenage boy’s perspective, and thus that focusing on all things arousing is only natural. But these leering and, again, endlessly repeated descriptions, read more like the errant mental wanderings of a horny older man than the thoughts of a pubescent boy … There is so much more I could’ve written, but thankfully, unlike Irving, I have a word count to consider.”

–Sweeney Byrne on John Irving’s The Last Chairlift ( The Irish Times )

“As an avant-garde firebrand in the 1960s, Handke wrote an ‘anti-play’ titled Offending the Audience, but now his strategy has shifted perilously close to Boring the Audience to Tears . Much like the narrator imagining the character of the fruit thief, I kept trying to envision a subset of readers who genuinely find this stuff delightful. Lacking most of the elements that draw people to fiction—insight, suspense and so on—it falls to either the language or the narrative material itself to make the novel worth the reader’s while. Although both have their moments—a mad speech in the final pages, an interlude at an inn that takes on the lighting and atmosphere of old European folk tales—the meal served up by this deeply eccentric novelist is spare and saltless, with no wine and no dessert. I suspect it’s the destiny of such an uncompromising writer as Peter Handke to end up writing basically for an audience of one. His most loyal readers, perhaps, adopt an attitude of veneration, hushed and solemn and more or less bored, the way many people attend Mass.”

–Rob Doyle on Peter Handke’s The Fruit Thief ( The New York Times Book Review )

Hungry for more harsh critiques?  Reacquaint yourself with The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2017  ,  2018 ,  2019 ,  2020 , and 2021 .

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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Our commitment to delivering trustworthy and engaging content is at the heart of what we do. Each fact on our site is contributed by real users like you, bringing a wealth of diverse insights and information. To ensure the highest standards of accuracy and reliability, our dedicated editors meticulously review each submission. This process guarantees that the facts we share are not only fascinating but also credible. Trust in our commitment to quality and authenticity as you explore and learn with us.

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Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir

“Knife” is an account of the writer’s brush with death in 2022, and the long recovery that followed.

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KNIFE: Meditations After an Attempted Murder , by Salman Rushdie

“So it’s you,” Salman Rushdie remembers thinking on the morning of Aug. 12, 2022, as a black-clad man, a “squat missile,” sprinted toward him on an auditorium stage in Chautauqua, N.Y. Rushdie thought: “Here you are.”

Thirty-three years had passed since the former supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa ordering the deaths of Rushdie and everyone involved in the publication of his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses.” It had been at least two decades since Rushdie stopped running. He had been living an almost normal life in New York City. Socially, he had become a giraffe, eating leaves from the tops of the highest trees, but he was seen in dive bars too.

The black-clad man was an apparition from an older, more punitive world, one Rushdie thought had largely forgotten about him.

It is among that August morning’s ironies that Rushdie was in Chautauqua to participate in a discussion about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Too stunned to try to protect himself, Rushdie only raised his left hand. At first, some in the audience thought the scuffle was performance art.

In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” Rushdie describes what happened next. The black-clad man, stabbing wildly, had 27 seconds alone with him. That is long enough, Rushdie points out, to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including his favorite, No. 130. He does not print the poem, but I will, to provide a sense of the interminable horror. This is 27 seconds:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

His attacker was at last subdued. Blood was everywhere, pooling. Rushdie’s clothes were cut off him. His legs were raised to keep what blood he had left flowing to his heart. He remembers feeling humiliated. “In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist,” he writes. The reader considers it a good sign, for Rushdie’s health and for the tone of this humane and often witty book, that among his first thoughts was, “Oh, my nice Ralph Lauren suit.”

A member of his surgery team later tells him, “When they brought you in from the helicopter, we didn’t think we could save you.” Rushdie describes the appalling damage:

There was the deep knife wound in my left hand, which severed all the tendons and most of the nerves. There were at least two more deep stab wounds in my neck — one slash right across it and more on the right side — and another farther up my face, also on the right. If I look at my chest now, I see a line of wounds down the center, two more slashes on the lower right side, and a cut on my upper right thigh. And there’s a wound on the left side of my mouth, and there was one along my hairline too. And there was the knife in the eye. That was the cruelest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there would be no possibility of saving the vision. It was gone.

As bad as this was, he had been fortunate. A doctor says, “You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”

This is Rushdie’s second memoir. His first, “Joseph Anton” — the title refers to the pseudonym he used when in hiding — was published in 2012. “Joseph Anton” is a sophisticated and multilayered book that recounts his years on the lam. It’s a book about friendship, about the many people who took him in. It was also a book about divorce. He was in the process of separating from his second wife, the novelist Marianne Wiggins, when the fatwa was announced, and during the book his third marriage, to Elizabeth West, falls apart as well.

“Knife,” on the other hand, contains a love story. Rushdie recounts meeting, wooing and marrying the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, three decades his junior. She is now Lady Rushdie; her husband was knighted in 2007 for services to literature. Their story adds buoyancy to this memoir. But it takes a long time for that light to pour in. First there will be arduous recovery and rehab.

The poet John Berryman said an artist is lucky when “presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.” This is cynical but true. I’ve rarely read about worse physical trauma.

Rushdie is initially held together by staples. His ruined eye bulged out of its socket and hung down his face “like a large soft-boiled egg.” He spends time on ventilators. There were small bags attached to his body to gather a variety of leaking fluids. No one will permit him to look in a mirror. Mentally, he tortures himself. Why had he not defended himself? Was it that he was 75 and his attacker 24?

“On some days I’m embarrassed, even ashamed, by my failure to try to fight back,” he writes. “On other days I tell myself not to be stupid, what do I imagine I could have done? This is as close to understanding my inaction as I’ve been able to get: The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.”

This is not, it must be said, the most elegant book. It does not have the emotional, intellectual and philosophical richness of the journalist Philippe Lançon’s memoir “Disturbance” (2019), about surviving the 2015 Charlie Hebdo magazine attacks by thugs claiming allegiance to Al Qaeda. But Rushdie was wise to largely stick to the details and stay out of his story’s way. To paraphrase Roy Blount Jr., I put this book down only once or twice, to wipe off the sweat.

During Rushdie’s convalescence, his friend Martin Amis died. Another friend, the editor and food writer Bill Buford, nearly expired from heart problems. Another, Paul Auster, discovered he had cancer. “There have been many times since the attack,” Rushdie writes, “when I have thought that Death was hovering over the wrong people.”

His mind, a free-associating unit, is intact. The literary and film references in “Knife” run deep. Along the way we learn that Rushdie is a “Law & Order” fan, that against his better judgment he orders books from Amazon, and that he needed the Chautauqua check to pay for a new air conditioning system. And so on.

Humor bubbles up organically from pain. “Dear reader, if you have never had a catheter inserted into your genital organ, do your very best to keep that record intact,” he writes. He enjoys that one of his surgeons has “the improbably gastronomic name of James Beard.” His account of a prostate exam includes these lines: “Aaagh. Double aaagh. Even more aaagh.” He is self-deprecating about his weight, which was 240 at the time of the attack. He lost 55 pounds in the months that followed. He does not recommend his weight loss technique.

He no longer has any urge, he writes, to defend “The Satanic Verses” or himself, although renunciation is the last thing on his mind. “If anyone’s looking for remorse,” he writes early on, “you can stop reading right here.”

Near the end of this memoir there is a sharp pivot. Throughout, Rushdie has provided pellets of information about his hostile and ill-informed attacker, whom he chooses to refer to as “the A.,” instead of the less decorous label (the Ass) he would prefer to use. Before the attack, the A. had been in Chautauqua for several nights, sleeping rough, checking out the site. He carried a false ID, his fake name an amalgam of the names of well-known Shia Muslim extremists. He had been living in his mother’s basement in New Jersey, playing video games and watching Netflix. He’d been radicalized by YouTube videos and, his mother suspected, by a trip to Lebanon in 2018.

Rushdie decides against trying to speak to him face to face. Instead, he imagines an interview with him, a conversation that consumes 30 pages of this book. I will not give the contents of this imagined interview away, except to say that the topics include radicalization, the ruthlessness that comes with the blinkered conviction that your cause is just, translation, hatred, laughter, literacy, gym memberships, mothers and the New York Giants.

Rushdie is no Oriana Fallaci, and no Tom Stoppard. I am not sure this section entirely comes off, but I am still processing it. Their fictional exchange did put me in mind of a bitter line from Lançon’s book, uttered by the satirical cartoonist Stéphane Jean-Abel Michel Charbonnier, better known as Charb: “If we start respecting people who don’t respect us, we might as well close up shop.”

“Knife” is a clarifying book. It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for. Rushdie’s friend Christopher Hitchens, in the wake of the initial fatwa, eloquently explained the stakes. The affair drew a line between “everything I hated versus everything I loved,” he wrote. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.” His words apply to this book.

Many questions are left at the close of “Knife.” It is uncertain if Rushdie will lose the sight in his remaining eye because of macular degeneration. It is unclear where Rushdie and Griffiths will choose to live. But the mood of this book is suggested by this line about going out to a restaurant for the first time since the attack: “After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

KNIFE : Meditations After an Attempted Murder | By Salman Rushdie | Random House | 209 pp. | $28

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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Breaking News

CASE PREVIEW

Court to mull injunction in starbucks case against memphis union organizers.

Union organizing efforts at Starbucks probably are the most protracted labor dispute of the decade, and on Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear argument in a closely watched case arising from the company’s firing of seven employees at a Memphis branch. The workers, known as the Memphis 7, said they were fired in retaliation for trying to unionize. The union, Starbucks Workers United, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which went to federal court and won a preliminary injunction.

Now, to be clear, the legal issue in this case has little to do with the propriety of Starbucks’ opposition to the union organizers. Rather, it is largely a procedural question: What standard should courts use to determine whether to issue issuing such a preliminary injunction? But the question is crucial in unionization disputes, because those injunctions can win employees their jobs back and can restrict companies for years while the NLRB completes administrative proceedings – for example, the one in this case has been in place for 20 months already.

The case here involves administrative proceedings under the National Labor Relations Act. Under the statutory framework, the NLRB files an administrative complaint, which launches an agency proceeding before an administrative law judge, whose decision is subject to review by the NLRB and then, in due course, in the federal courts of appeals. While those proceedings go forward, the NLRB can seek immediate relief by asking a federal district court to grant a preliminary injunction under Section 10(j) of the NLRA.

Starbucks has been in a long and pitched battle with union efforts to organize employees at Starbucks retail locations. After employees at the Memphis store held an in-store interview with the press after hours, Starbucks fired them, saying they had violated company policy.

The NLRB responded by filing an administrative complaint. It then promptly went to a federal district court seeking an injunction under Section 10(j), which would order Starbucks to reinstate the employees and make a variety of other policy changes that would facilitate work by union organizers. The district court agreed with the NLRB and granted the injunction.

To understand the context of the case before the justices, it is important to understand the scope of the dispute between the NLRB and Starbucks. This is the 12th such injunction the NLRB has requested against Starbucks in the last two years, more than a third of all the requests it has made nationwide during that time period. So the justices have picked the NLRB’s hot topic for their review.

The legal question for the justices is crisp and easy to explain. Specifically, how hard should it be for the NLRB to get an injunction in a case like this one? The statute doesn’t say much, it simply provides that the court should grant “such temporary relief … as it deems just and proper.” For its part, Starbucks points to a traditional four-part test courts have developed for deciding when to issue preliminary injunctions (sometimes called the Winter test ). That test calls for consideration of the likelihood that the party seeking the injunction will succeed on the merits; whether the party will suffer irreparable harm without preliminary relief; whether the balance of equity tips in that party’s favor; and the public interest. Starbucks argues that the Supreme Court has applied that standard in many contexts, and that the court requires a specific textual command to opt out of it. For Starbucks, the “just and proper” language is far too imprecise to justify a departure from the traditional standard.

Starbucks contends that the NLRB’s test, applied by the lower courts here, is much more lenient, because it considers only two factors, whether the NLRB can show “reasonable cause” to believe that unfair labor practices have occurred and that injunctive relief is “just and proper.” That might sound so vague as to be basically the same as the four-part test, but it is not. Most importantly, the reasonable cause standard (unlike the “likelihood of success on the merits” factor in the traditional test) requires considerable deference to the NLRB, which need show only “some evidence” and a “not frivolous” legal theory, with all factual and legal uncertainty being resolved in favor of the NLRB’s administrative expertise.

The government argues that the NLRB’s two-factor standard is really just an application of the traditional test, taking account of the unique statutory context of an expert agency’s administrative enforcement proceeding. On the merits – the “reasonable cause” prong – the government emphasizes that the court has to “keep in mind that the Board — not the courts — is responsible for adjudicating the underlying unfair-labor practice charge.” Accordingly, the government argues, it would make no sense for a district to “conduct a full-blown merits inquiry” at the preliminary stage. Rather, the “agency’s preliminary assessment of the merits” should be enough. In the same way, the government argues, the progress of agency proceedings should be enough to establish the only relevant public interest – that the absence of judicial relief to preserve the status quo pending agency proceedings will undermine the effectiveness of the relief the NLRB can grant at the conclusion of its process.

Starbucks’ reply is scathing. It emphasizes the stark difference between showing that the agency is “likely to succeed,” the traditional standard, and showing a “substantial and not frivolous” legal theory, the standard the agency defends before the court. Similarly, Starbucks says that the agency’s understanding of harm and the public interest depends solely on the agency’s perspective, as it entirely ignores any injury that employers might suffer from interference with their workplace or otherwise during the progress of the agency’s proceedings.

This is a fascinating case, and I expect the justices will be fully engaged. I would be surprised if several of the justices are not attracted to the logic of holding an agency to the same standard the court traditionally applies for private litigants, leaving it to Congress to specify departures from that standard. Furthermore, I expect some justices will be disturbed by the NLRB’s extensive attention on Starbucks. This may be yet another step in the court’s seeming effort to curtail the power of federal agencies this term.

Posted in Merits Cases

Cases: Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney

Recommended Citation: Ronald Mann, Court to mull injunction in Starbucks case against Memphis union organizers , SCOTUSblog (Apr. 22, 2024, 5:07 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/04/court-to-mull-injunction-in-starbucks-case-against-memphis-union-organizers/

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