CHRISTMAS BOOKS IN BRIEF Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages selected by Harold Bloom (Scribner, 570 pp., $27.50) What is Bloom up to? Every time he publishes a book of nutty postmodernness, he follows it with a book so old-fashioned it’s positively premodern. He’s America’s best-known critic, and he seems to think that means he has to dance at everybody’s ball. Fortunately, in his latest entry, Bloom has stopped in at the sensible people’s ball. Intending his marvelous new anthology for “children of all ages,” he laments the “dumbing-down” of children’s literature, and he demonstrates how delightful intelligent works can be. Most of the selections–such as Kipling’s story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”–are brilliantly chosen for reading aloud. A few fall over the cliff: Good luck to the parent who wants to try “My Cat Jeoffrey,” the Christian-mysticism-meets-domestic-animals poem Kit Smart wrote in the insane asylum. But Bloom urges perseverance, arguing that “reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others.” If you agree with Bloom’s almost Victorian sentiment that a child reading is “the true image of potential happiness,” then this book is a marvelous Christmas present–for your children and yourself. –Richard Datchery Dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath by David Kuo (Little, Brown, & Company, 320 pp., $25.95) I remember the days of dot.com fever. I owed more in school loans than I made in salary, but as the Nasdaq inched toward 5,000, I invested what I could in tech stocks. My portfolio, which at one point reached $6,500, is now $114.62, and I revisit those days with great reluctance. But David Kuo’s “Dot.bomb”–about his days at Value America, a company that aimed to be the nation’s largest online retailer–is so hilarious, it almost recoups my losses. Kuo joined the Virginia-based Value America as senior vice president for communications. While the company’s head, Craig Winn, described the generous employment terms, Kuo writes, “Inside I was wondering if I could afford a new beach house in Nantucket and a ski chalet in Switzerland or whether I’d be forced to choose between the two. It was somehow tragic that my oversize body didn’t fit well in that nice little Jaguar convertible. Perhaps they could customize it to fit me?” Kuo effortlessly brings his readers along for the ride as he relates those incautious days. His depiction of Craig Winn is particularly evocative, for the bravado that made the man believe he could be the world’s largest online retailer is exactly what caused his undoing. Kuo didn’t amass the hundreds of millions that at one point seemed strangely realistic, but his account of the time he spent trying is very rich, indeed. –Stephen F. Hayes The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds by Tammy Bruce (Prima, 300 pp., $23.95) For years conservatives have tried to alert us to the manipulations of the left, but that’s something lefties can do a better job of when they try. Take “The New Thought Police,” by the feminist and lesbian activist Tammy Bruce, who worked with the gay, feminist, and black civil-rights establishment. From GLAAD’s attack on Dr. Laura Schlessinger to NOW’s silence about the scandals of Bill Clinton to the fund-raising tactics of Jesse Jackson, Bruce rips through the absurdities and dangers of the left’s thought-police mentality. Tammy Bruce is no conservative, but “The New Thought Police” demands a return to true freedom of expression so Americans can once again enjoy honest–and therefore dynamic–debates. –Nicole Topham The Siege of the Arts: Collected Writings 1994-2001 by Robert Brustein (Ivan R. Dee, 288 pp., $16.95) A great drama critic must have a good playwright’s facility with words, a large historical knowledge, perspicacity, and judgment. In “The Siege of the Arts,” Robert Brustein proves he’s a great drama critic. This isn’t to say his latest collection of essays has no blind spots. Brustein can’t see much good in Tom Stoppard. He confuses free speech with support for the NEA. And he promotes that much more ineradicable institution, Robert Wilson. But he also provides knowledge, wit, and an unwillingness to lie or placate. He points out, for example, that Edward Albee’s renewed popularity has been gained at the expense of sharpness. Speaking to the David Mamet Society, he brutally mocks Mamet’s stupid theories on acting. Brustein denounces the McCarthyism of the left unsparingly, as when he writes of the drama professor at Arizona State who was fired for using Shakespeare, rather than black, female, gay, or Latino playwrights. In talking about the NEA controversy he notes Jane Alexander’s inability to get Clinton even once on the phone during her first years as head of the institution. He relates his own experience talking to the president about culture. (Clinton thought he was talking about cultures and began lecturing him on China.) All in all, this is a very fine collection. –Jonathan Leaf Granta 21: The First Twenty-One Years edited by Ian Jack (Granta, 384 pp., $14.95) Based in Britain, Granta magazine emerged in the early 1980s as a darker, hipper, more Eurocentric version of the New Yorker, offering a smart and readable blend of fiction, autobiography, photojournalism, and reportage. Over the years, Granta published a few too many drab, crabbed examples of “dirty realism” in fiction and too many accounts of seediness and corruption in exotic locales. Every issue, it sometimes seemed, featured a cranky Englishman floating through Borneo in a canoe. Still, Granta set a high standard for originality and topicality: No publication gave a more vivid sense of the intellectual and political atmosphere surrounding the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe more than a decade ago. This volume includes a good sampling of the magazine’s more memorable pieces, including Diana Athill’s bemused recollection of friendship with the prickly V.S. Naipaul and Amitav Ghosh’s affecting account of art and resilience in Cambodia during Pol Pot’s murderous reign. An interesting look back at what was once the hottest magazine in the literary trade. –Brian Murray Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City by Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall (Yale University Press, 448 pp., $39.95) New York City’s archaeological record is mostly erasures. “Unearthing Gotham,” a journeyman study by two urban anthropologists, aspires to speak for those “passed over” in the city’s history: immigrants, the underclass, Native Americans, etc. The authors manage to relate a few interesting moments. In 1916, digging a subway tunnel at Greenwich and Dey, workmen discovered the charred keel and three ribs of what is probably Adrian Block’s Tiger, which burned in January 1614. But in general the evidence Cantwell and Wall hope for is sparse: Over the past 25 years, archaeologists armed by preservation laws have been able to hitch a ride on the heavy equipment that excavates foundations and basements well below the city’s accumulated landfill, but little has resulted. In the early 1990s, the government planned to build an office tower on the site of an 18th-century Negro burial ground. The resulting collision of power and pieties might be rewritten as an opera for bureaucrats and activists–although one is forced to wonder whether anything in Manhattan can stay sacred space. Didn’t Trinity Church grow rich, and stay rich, on real estate? There’s material in all this for contemplating the future of the site of the World Trade Center. In a manner unpredictable and uncontrollable, what is lost always manages to speak through the pieces of what remains. There’s meaning in a vacant lot. –Laurance Wieder Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism by William McGowan (Encounter, 278 pp., $25.95) McGowan’s “Coloring the News” paints in grim detail how the diversity juggernaut conquered the nation’s newsrooms, relentlessly documenting how quota hiring, identity politics, and self-
censorship has slanted reporting on racial issues, gay and feminist topics, affirmative action, and immigration. Instead of providing balanced discussion of complex issues, reporters either avoid these topics altogether or yield to pressures for simplistic pro-diversity propaganda. Leading journalists have pulled their punches on high black crime rates, ignored “gender norming” in the Pentagon’s politically correct campaign to integrate women into military life, suppressed data regarding a resurgence of high-risk sexual behavior among gay men, and suppressed recognition of mushrooming problems in health, corruption, and cut-throat economic competition wrought by massive waves of immigrants. McGowan concludes that journalism’s diversity crusade helped erode civic culture, while failing to deliver new minority audiences. Indeed, the effort to color the news ended up polarizing it: Alienated whites gravitated to talk radio, the Internet, and cable TV, exacerbating the trend diversity activists thought they would end. It’s a sad story of the decline of journalism. –Frederick R. Lynch
