Books in Brief
Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon, 224 pp., $24). Inside Laura Kipnis, there’s a talented social satirist screaming to get out. Kipnis’s “Against Love” attacks contemporary American ideals of love, marriage, sexual fidelity, and family life. Along the way, Kipnis exposes the contradictions in the American view of love–the selfishness we try to disguise as eros: “Leeches and bleeding served a similar purpose in previous models of the body. However, we moderns ‘express our feelings’ in lieu of our fluids, because everyone knows that those who don’t are more disease prone, and more subject to cancer, ulcers, or a host of other dire ailments.”
But Kipnis falls victim to the same naiveté and humorlessness she decries. She briefly acknowledges, for instance, the inconvenient fact that women get pregnant: Sex still makes babies, even when we don’t want it to. Her solution? Socialism. We should be like Sweden, replacing marriage with a social safety net. She apparently sees no need to worry about the fatherless children who won’t be satisfied with this substitution.
There’s something to be said about the topics taken up by “Against Love,” but Kipnis isn’t the woman to do it. This book should have been written by Florence King.
–Eve Tushnet
Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite by Bernard Goldberg (Warner, 310 pp., $26.95). Bernard Goldberg’s latest–a lively follow-up to his 2002 surprise bestseller, “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News”–is aimed at the mainstream journalists still suffering from liberal media bias. Goldberg, a former CBS News correspondent, even offers a twelve-step program for their recovery: “And if a twelve-step program can help drunks . . . then why not journalists?”
“Arrogance” teems with more examples of reporters at news organizations who pay more attention to being politically correct than reporting the facts. And Goldberg pities the self-doubting producers at the major networks who allow an important story to be reported only after it’s first been mentioned in the New York Times–where “ideology regularly gets shoehorned into places you’d never expect to find it–not just . . . in the editorial or book or culture sections but . . . on the sports pages, too, where diversity and feminist issues are always being rammed down readers’ throats.”
When you add in the even more extreme condition of journalism schools–“They love diversity, these academic elites, but have no passion for a diversity of ideas”–things look bleak, indeed. But there’s hope. Goldberg believes many journalists are troubled by their newsrooms, although they remain silent to avoid being labeled a “right-wing crazy.” Perhaps now they’ll follow Goldberg’s lead and break their silence.
–Erin Montgomery
Pompeii by Robert Harris (Random House, 278 pp., $24.95). Compared with Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 classic “The Last Days of Pompeii,” with its huge cast of characters and thickly tangled plot, Robert Harris has definitely written Pompeii Lite. Still, it has its own excitement and suspense.
The book turns on a leak in the impressive aqueduct that supplies a quarter of a million people around the Bay of Naples. A young engineer, straight arrow Marcus Attilius Primus, must discover the fault before Pompeii runs dry. In his work, he runs up against various wealthy and corrupt figures, particularly a former slave who is about to punish one of his own slaves by throwing him into a pond of eels for having let his prized mullets die. But the dead mullets give young Attilius a clue. Sulfur has seeped into the water–that’s what killed them. From then on it’s a race against time.
Even though everyone knows what happened to that small Roman town, Harris skillfully builds suspense in tracking the damage to the aqueduct and linking it to the historic eruption. And you certainly do learn an awful lot about Roman life in A.D. 79.
–Cynthia Grenier
