Books in Brief
As we go to press, three books by Weekly Standard authors are among the top hundred bestsellers on Amazon.com. Two of them we mentioned a couple of weeks ago: “The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush” by contributing editor David Frum, and “Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order” by contributing editor Robert Kagan.
The third is The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission (Encounter, 153 pp., $25.95), coauthored by The Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol and the New Republic’s Lawrence F. Kaplan. The book presents in strong terms the immediate dangers posed by Iraq–and it goes on to point out, in even stronger terms, the global consequences if we do not act against Saddam’s tyranny. Shall we encourage dictators and terrorists around the world to believe America can be defied and attacked at will? What responsible president could allow our safety to be compromised this way?
But Kristol and Kaplan don’t argue solely from America’s own safety. This nation owes the world more than self-interest, and we have a duty to increase democracy and freedom wherever we can. “The mission begins in Baghdad,” Kristol and Kaplan write, “but it does not end there.” Rightly understanding the world and itself, America is capable of projecting strength in real power politics and simultaneously aiming for high moral ends. “Duly armed,” “The War Over Ira”q concludes, “the United States can act to secure its safety and to advance the cause of liberty–in Baghdad and beyond.”
A few years ago, The Weekly Standard ran an essay by Tracy Lee Simmons about Amazon.com. Among other things, the essay teased authors for Amazon-envy, compulsively comparing every hour their sales ranks with their friends’. This isn’t something we want to encourage among Kagan, Frum, Kaplan, and Kristol (particularly when my own book of poetry has fallen to be the 480,320th bestseller). But the appearance of three Weekly Standard books in the top hundred seems worth notice.
–J. Bottum
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk by Susan McDougal (Carroll & Graf, 336 pp., $25). If Michael Kinsley can admit he didn’t read the books he was assigned as the judge of a major book prize, it’s hard to hold reviewers to the stern, old-fashioned demand that they actually study the book they’ve been asked to review. Still, you hate to see a reviewer get caught as badly as Beverly Lowry was with her review in the New York Times of Susan McDougal’s memoir “The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk.”
The book-discussion website Mobylives.com deserves credit for promoting the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette column in which Gene Lyons took note of Lowry’s errors and peculiar Southern style of writing. “Moonbeams and Magnolias at the New York Times,” he called it.
Lowry wrote, “The future president was governor and the McDougals owned a bank and a savings and loan and were buying and selling land and, like a lot of other people they knew, making money hand over fist.” Is this, Lyons asks, supposed to imply that the Clintons made money on Whitewater? In fact they lost $43,000. Later in her review, Lowry commiserates with McDougal for her felony convictions on obstruction of justice and criminal contempt–of which McDougal was actually acquitted, in the scene that is the climax of “The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk.” (The Times ran a correction about this point on February 2.)
Lowry also asserts that the reason McDougal tried to shelter the Clintons was that she was in love with Bill. It’s almost overkill when Lyons observes that McDougal vehemently denies this explanation–portraying the president in her book as a “glib horn-dog who looks awful in jogging shorts.”
Lyons concludes that Lowry “appears to have skimmed the opening chapters for information confirming her own loopy notions about ‘girl children from the Deep South’–she’s the kind of Professional Southerner who peddles moonbeams to Yankees–then winged it.” As for her future reviews, his advice is simple. “Yo, Beverly. Next time, read the damn book.”
–Beth Henary
