My Secret: A PostSecret Book

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My Secret is Frank Warren's second collection of PostSecret postcards. To give a quick overview of what this is all about - PostSecret is described as a "community art project" where strangers mail Warren a postcard with a very personal secret which they have never shared with anyone before. The Postcard is typically decorated with some sort of artwork that describes the secret being sent. Every Sunday Warren posts them on his PostSecret blog, but he has also published three collections of the postcards. My Secret: A PostSecret Book is the second of the three collections.

What is first notable about My Secret is that it is quite a bit smaller than PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. Without measuring or weighing the book, I would suggest that My Secret is approximately half the size. What this means is that there is far less content for your dollar.

The second thing to point out is that some of these postcards may have been recycled from the first volume. I have not confirmed this by comparing the two books side by side, but some of the postcards were suspiciously familiar. If some of them were not reused, they are very similar to the postcards of volume one with mostly the same content.

This may come across as a knock on My Secret, and in a sense it is, but if we look at My Secret as an individual volume standing alone, the second complaint falls away. My Secret is a collection of some funny and heartbreaking secrets that anyone may have sent in. Considering the volume of postcards Warren has received, any of our neighbors may have a postcard on the website or in a book at any given time. This is what is special about the PostSecret project and in turn about each of the collections. Reading these collections tells the reader that he or she is not alone, that other people have felt this way and that the painful experience is not unique and this can be a way to heal. Reading these collections shows us that we all have something extraordinary about us that our friends and family may never guess. While it is the painful ones which may be most remarkable, there are also funny and happy and silly secrets.

It is ultimately impossible to separate My Secret from the other collections and from the PostSecret project as a whole, so I will close by saying this: My Secret is not as strong of a collection as the first volume. It is smaller and somewhat weaker. But, with that said, it is still worth the half hour or and hour which it will take to go through all of the secrets and get a glimpse into the lives of others, and in turn into ourselves.

-Joe Sherry
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Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina

At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
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Throughout George W. Bush's presidency, no columnist has been more perceptive than Frank Rich of the New York Times. A longtime film and drama critic, Rich, for the past decade, has used his insights into performance and stagecraft to explain a political culture increasingly dominated by simulation and spectacle.

Exploring the news each week through the lens of pop culture -- the film "United 93" or the TV show "24," for example -- Rich teases out implications that escape straight-news pundits. The technique allows him to illuminate not only the submerged political currents of mass entertainment but also the theatricality of Washington politics today.

Now Rich has written The Greatest Story Ever Sold, a gripping, witty and devastating indictment of President Bush's reliance on public relations to market his Iraq and counterterrorism policies. Future historians will turn to other works -- by James Bamford, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward -- to understand White House and Pentagon decision-making after 9/11. But Rich's overview will be indispensable for grasping how Americans experienced the events of these years.

For those who have largely opposed Bush's policies, reading Rich's book summons up familiar feelings of outrage and helplessness. Those readers who have tipped from being Bush supporters to critics may gain some wisdom into why they were originally led astray. And even die-hard Bushies may appreciate this volume as a shrewd study in the history of political PR -- if, that is, they can get past Rich's wry, withering tone.

As in his columns, Rich uses cultural touchstones such as Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America and the movie "Chicago" to help us see how populist demagoguery works or how a huckster can con a press pack. But the book's core is a survey of the White House spins and shams since 9/11, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" scare tactics, Colin Powell's Adlai Stevenson impersonation at the United Nations and, of course, Bush's May 2003 "Mission Accomplished" declaration on the flight deck. Rich deftly arranges these and other public moments alongside cases of secret government propaganda -- the payola to working journalists, the fake "video news releases" slipped into local TV news shows -- to construct a persuasive picture of an administration bent on creating "our own reality," as one Bush aide famously put it.

Rich does let a few people off the hook. He's too easy on Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who, while fashioning himself as the second coming of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, has abetted the president's anti-press campaign by jailing one reporter for not playing ball and threatening others.

In my view, Rich lays too much blame for the free hand that Bush has enjoyed at the door of the Fourth Estate. Rich doesn't go as far as some other recent books that lambaste reporters as lapdogs, but he laments that "there was only sporadic digging into the war-ennobled administration by mainstream journalists" and that TV news "barely raised any questions at all."

Obviously, individual outlets, including the New York Times for which Rich writes, erred badly in overplaying claims about the menace Saddam Hussein posed. Some Washington correspondents went native, identifying too closely with insider sources. The tabloid tenor of most broadcast news -- about which Rich has written brilliantly -- fanned Americans' crudest urges.

But Rich's well-researched narrative testifies to the dogged, independent-minded reporting that -- despite this oppressive climate -- revealed official mistakes, lies and violations of law. In recounting the long trail of administration deceptions and blunders, Rich credits the reporters at The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal who discovered them. He cites scoops from outlets as diverse as Roll Call, the National Journal, the Smoking Gun, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Even the generally abysmal TV news shows did some worthy investigation, he tells us: CBS News exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel grilled Bush and other evasive heavies at key moments.

What The Greatest Story Ever Sold illustrates is that most Americans did not back the Iraq invasion because they were credulous, though many were, or even because the administration was dishonest, though it was -- reprehensibly so. In the end, notwithstanding the hype, the truth wasn't all that hard to see; even Bush's misleading claims that Saddam Hussein was about to acquire nukes were debunked on the front pages, as Rich points out, before the invasion began. Yet most citizens, despite access to evidence, chose to follow the president anyway. Rich doesn't get into why they did so, but I think the reasons boil down to a widespread popular desire to exorcise post-9/11 feelings of shame and vulnerability with the nationalistic pride achieved through the exercise of military might.

Many people who might have supported the Iraq war under different circumstances remained intractably opposed because they believed Bush hadn't proven that Baghdad was making nuclear weapons or working with al-Qaeda. They held this view because, among other reasons, in the months and years after 9/11, they were reading the smart, critical and blessedly spin-proof writings of Frank Rich.

Reviewed by David Greenberg

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

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It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle - make the change.

Grade 3-6–This achingly beautiful story shows a true master of writing at her very best. Edward Tulane is an exceedingly vain, cold-hearted china rabbit owned by 10-year-old Abilene Tulane, who dearly loves him. Her grandmother relates a fairy tale about a princess who never felt love; she then whispers to Edward that he disappoints her. His path to redemption begins when he falls overboard during the familys ocean journey. Sinking to the bottom of the sea where he will spend 297 days, Edward feels his first emotion–fear. Caught in a fishermans net, he lives with the old man and his wife and begins to care about his humans. Then their adult daughter takes him to the dump, where a dog and a hobo find him. They ride the rails together until Edward is cruelly separated from them. His heart is truly broken when next owner, four-year-old Sarah Ruth, dies. He recalls Abilenes grandmother with a new sense of humility, wishing she knew that he has learned to love. When his head is shattered by an angry man, Edward wants to join Sarah Ruth but those he has loved convince him to live. Repaired by a doll store owner, he closes his heart to love, as it is too painful, until a wise doll tells him that he that he must open his heart for someone to love him. This superb book is beautifully written in spare yet stirring language. The tender look at the changes from arrogance to grateful loving is perfectly delineated. Ibatoullines lovely sepia-toned gouache illustrations and beautifully rendered color plates are exquisite. An ever-so-marvelous tale.–B. Allison Gray, John Jermain Library, Sag Harbor, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Water for Elephants: A Novel

From Baghdad, With Love: A Marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
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The news from Iraq keeps getting grimmer, but Iraq veteran Kopelman and journalist Roth (The Man Who Talks to Dogs) tell a tale of radiant joy about Kopelman's efforts to safely transport Lava, the stray dog his Marine unit found in the wreckage of Fallujah, back to the U.S. Though the premise sounds cloying, Kopelman and Roth eschew sentimentality. They don't hesitate to detail the corruption of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. military bureaucracy or the extreme hardships of the Iraqi people. Kopelman's nagging qualms about keeping the dog in violation of military orders throw into relief his efforts to repress his guilt over working so hard to save a dog amid so much human suffering. Most bracing are the frank descriptions of the war's moral vacuum, where terrified men and women—like the dogs that Iraqi insurgents strap with bombs and send charging into the enemy—are driven to commit unspeakable acts they cannot possibly understand. The story of Lava's journey out of Iraq is exciting, but it's to Kopelman and Roth's credit that it's not nearly as harrowing as the story of what the dog left behind. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel

I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence
Goal improvements

Nathan is a retired life insurance salesman who has lung cancer that has gone into remission. Recently divorced, the assets split amicably, he decides to go back to his roots and live the rest of his life in Brooklyn. He rents a flat in his old neighbourhood and slowly settles into what seems to be a quiet retirement. Nathan has also started to write a book of sorts, "The Book of Human Folly", an account of every blunder, embarrassment, idiocy and inane act he has committed and experienced throughout his long life. These tales of life's absurdities are also about other people, revealing the pure folly of the human condition. The narrative for the most part centres on Nathan's nephew, Tom, a failed academic who has given up on life, where they coincidentally meet in Brooklyn, and grow to be good friends. This short summary may appear boring, a book about normal people living mundane lives, but that's what makes this novel so good, the mundane becomes the miraculous, the ordinary the extraordinary.

Paul Auster is arguably one of the greatest living American writers working today. Reading his novel's is a captivating journey into the extraordinary, a glimpse at possibilities, an opportunity to view the world from a different perspective, and in some cases, one changes and sees life differently, a sometimes for the better.

I'll never forget my first Auster novel, "A New York Trilogy" becoming totally submerged in a world so alien, so odd and so fascinating, that it was astounding to discover an author with such talent and erudition. This writer had something special happening, thus I read everything I could get my hands on: "Moon Palace", "The Music of Chance", "Leviathan" and "Mr.Vertigo", which happens to be one of the most original tales to come out in the last twenty-five years. "The Brooklyn Follies" had me enthralled from the first chapter, wanting to know more about these characters, their talents, loves and mishaps, coming to the conclusion, that we are by and large a strange species, and at bottom, it is our need for companionship, love if you will, that gets us into trouble but also keeps us struggling, at times making life worth living, and sometimes a living hell.

Nathan is at worst a cynic, although a man who really wants to do the right thing, help his apathetic nephew, reconnect with his only daughter, innocently flirt with the married waitress at his lunchtime haunt, (which has dire consequences) and write about the human condition. Nathan is everyman, a good soul and has grown not to take life too seriously, which he has discovered comes with age.

This is a compelling novel about ordinary people with dreams and aspirations, disappointments and triumphs, embarrassments and success - a depiction of the modern human condition with all its craziness, stupidity and humour.

An excellent novel.
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House of Meetings by Martin Amis

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It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle - make the change.

Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin (though he also acknowledges his debt to some later books than his own) he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. He is also agonizing about the botched hostage situation in North Ossetia, ongooing as he writes. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional, as well as a lament for his native country.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, for certain.
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American Born Chinese

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The Origin And History Of Hypnosis

Indie graphic novelist Gene Yang's intelligent and emotionally challenging American Born Chinese is made up of three individual plotlines: the determined efforts of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King to shed his humble roots and be revered as a god; the struggles faced by Jin Wang, a lonely Asian American middle school student who would do anything to fit in with his white classmates; and the sitcom plight of Danny, an All-American teen so shamed by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee (a purposefully painful ethnic stereotype) that he is forced to change schools. Each story works well on its own, but Yang engineers a clever convergence of these parallel tales into a powerful climax that destroys the hateful stereotype of Chin-Kee, while leaving both Jin Wang and the Monkey King satisfied and happy to be who they are. Yang skillfully weaves these affecting, often humorous stories together to create a masterful commentary about race, identity, and self-acceptance that has earned him a spot as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People. The artwork, rendered in a chromatically cool palette, is crisp and clear, with clean white space around center panels that sharply focuses the reader's attention in on Yang's achingly familiar characters. There isn't an adolescent alive who won't be able to relate to Jin's wish to be someone other than who he is, and his gradual realization that there is no better feeling than being comfortable in your own skin.--Jennifer Hubert
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House of Meetings by Martin Amis

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Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin (though he also acknowledges his debt to some later books than his own) he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. He is also agonizing about the botched hostage situation in North Ossetia, ongooing as he writes. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional, as well as a lament for his native country.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, for certain.
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Throughout George W. Bush's presidency, no columnist has been more perceptive than Frank Rich of the New York Times. A longtime film and drama critic, Rich, for the past decade, has used his insights into performance and stagecraft to explain a political culture increasingly dominated by simulation and spectacle.

Exploring the news each week through the lens of pop culture -- the film "United 93" or the TV show "24," for example -- Rich teases out implications that escape straight-news pundits. The technique allows him to illuminate not only the submerged political currents of mass entertainment but also the theatricality of Washington politics today.

Now Rich has written The Greatest Story Ever Sold, a gripping, witty and devastating indictment of President Bush's reliance on public relations to market his Iraq and counterterrorism policies. Future historians will turn to other works -- by James Bamford, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward -- to understand White House and Pentagon decision-making after 9/11. But Rich's overview will be indispensable for grasping how Americans experienced the events of these years.

For those who have largely opposed Bush's policies, reading Rich's book summons up familiar feelings of outrage and helplessness. Those readers who have tipped from being Bush supporters to critics may gain some wisdom into why they were originally led astray. And even die-hard Bushies may appreciate this volume as a shrewd study in the history of political PR -- if, that is, they can get past Rich's wry, withering tone.

As in his columns, Rich uses cultural touchstones such as Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America and the movie "Chicago" to help us see how populist demagoguery works or how a huckster can con a press pack. But the book's core is a survey of the White House spins and shams since 9/11, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" scare tactics, Colin Powell's Adlai Stevenson impersonation at the United Nations and, of course, Bush's May 2003 "Mission Accomplished" declaration on the flight deck. Rich deftly arranges these and other public moments alongside cases of secret government propaganda -- the payola to working journalists, the fake "video news releases" slipped into local TV news shows -- to construct a persuasive picture of an administration bent on creating "our own reality," as one Bush aide famously put it.

Rich does let a few people off the hook. He's too easy on Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who, while fashioning himself as the second coming of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, has abetted the president's anti-press campaign by jailing one reporter for not playing ball and threatening others.

In my view, Rich lays too much blame for the free hand that Bush has enjoyed at the door of the Fourth Estate. Rich doesn't go as far as some other recent books that lambaste reporters as lapdogs, but he laments that "there was only sporadic digging into the war-ennobled administration by mainstream journalists" and that TV news "barely raised any questions at all."

Obviously, individual outlets, including the New York Times for which Rich writes, erred badly in overplaying claims about the menace Saddam Hussein posed. Some Washington correspondents went native, identifying too closely with insider sources. The tabloid tenor of most broadcast news -- about which Rich has written brilliantly -- fanned Americans' crudest urges.

But Rich's well-researched narrative testifies to the dogged, independent-minded reporting that -- despite this oppressive climate -- revealed official mistakes, lies and violations of law. In recounting the long trail of administration deceptions and blunders, Rich credits the reporters at The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal who discovered them. He cites scoops from outlets as diverse as Roll Call, the National Journal, the Smoking Gun, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Even the generally abysmal TV news shows did some worthy investigation, he tells us: CBS News exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel grilled Bush and other evasive heavies at key moments.

What The Greatest Story Ever Sold illustrates is that most Americans did not back the Iraq invasion because they were credulous, though many were, or even because the administration was dishonest, though it was -- reprehensibly so. In the end, notwithstanding the hype, the truth wasn't all that hard to see; even Bush's misleading claims that Saddam Hussein was about to acquire nukes were debunked on the front pages, as Rich points out, before the invasion began. Yet most citizens, despite access to evidence, chose to follow the president anyway. Rich doesn't get into why they did so, but I think the reasons boil down to a widespread popular desire to exorcise post-9/11 feelings of shame and vulnerability with the nationalistic pride achieved through the exercise of military might.

Many people who might have supported the Iraq war under different circumstances remained intractably opposed because they believed Bush hadn't proven that Baghdad was making nuclear weapons or working with al-Qaeda. They held this view because, among other reasons, in the months and years after 9/11, they were reading the smart, critical and blessedly spin-proof writings of Frank Rich.

Reviewed by David Greenberg

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
Finances improvements

Throughout George W. Bush's presidency, no columnist has been more perceptive than Frank Rich of the New York Times. A longtime film and drama critic, Rich, for the past decade, has used his insights into performance and stagecraft to explain a political culture increasingly dominated by simulation and spectacle.

Exploring the news each week through the lens of pop culture -- the film "United 93" or the TV show "24," for example -- Rich teases out implications that escape straight-news pundits. The technique allows him to illuminate not only the submerged political currents of mass entertainment but also the theatricality of Washington politics today.

Now Rich has written The Greatest Story Ever Sold, a gripping, witty and devastating indictment of President Bush's reliance on public relations to market his Iraq and counterterrorism policies. Future historians will turn to other works -- by James Bamford, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward -- to understand White House and Pentagon decision-making after 9/11. But Rich's overview will be indispensable for grasping how Americans experienced the events of these years.

For those who have largely opposed Bush's policies, reading Rich's book summons up familiar feelings of outrage and helplessness. Those readers who have tipped from being Bush supporters to critics may gain some wisdom into why they were originally led astray. And even die-hard Bushies may appreciate this volume as a shrewd study in the history of political PR -- if, that is, they can get past Rich's wry, withering tone.

As in his columns, Rich uses cultural touchstones such as Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America and the movie "Chicago" to help us see how populist demagoguery works or how a huckster can con a press pack. But the book's core is a survey of the White House spins and shams since 9/11, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" scare tactics, Colin Powell's Adlai Stevenson impersonation at the United Nations and, of course, Bush's May 2003 "Mission Accomplished" declaration on the flight deck. Rich deftly arranges these and other public moments alongside cases of secret government propaganda -- the payola to working journalists, the fake "video news releases" slipped into local TV news shows -- to construct a persuasive picture of an administration bent on creating "our own reality," as one Bush aide famously put it.

Rich does let a few people off the hook. He's too easy on Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who, while fashioning himself as the second coming of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, has abetted the president's anti-press campaign by jailing one reporter for not playing ball and threatening others.

In my view, Rich lays too much blame for the free hand that Bush has enjoyed at the door of the Fourth Estate. Rich doesn't go as far as some other recent books that lambaste reporters as lapdogs, but he laments that "there was only sporadic digging into the war-ennobled administration by mainstream journalists" and that TV news "barely raised any questions at all."

Obviously, individual outlets, including the New York Times for which Rich writes, erred badly in overplaying claims about the menace Saddam Hussein posed. Some Washington correspondents went native, identifying too closely with insider sources. The tabloid tenor of most broadcast news -- about which Rich has written brilliantly -- fanned Americans' crudest urges.

But Rich's well-researched narrative testifies to the dogged, independent-minded reporting that -- despite this oppressive climate -- revealed official mistakes, lies and violations of law. In recounting the long trail of administration deceptions and blunders, Rich credits the reporters at The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal who discovered them. He cites scoops from outlets as diverse as Roll Call, the National Journal, the Smoking Gun, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Even the generally abysmal TV news shows did some worthy investigation, he tells us: CBS News exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel grilled Bush and other evasive heavies at key moments.

What The Greatest Story Ever Sold illustrates is that most Americans did not back the Iraq invasion because they were credulous, though many were, or even because the administration was dishonest, though it was -- reprehensibly so. In the end, notwithstanding the hype, the truth wasn't all that hard to see; even Bush's misleading claims that Saddam Hussein was about to acquire nukes were debunked on the front pages, as Rich points out, before the invasion began. Yet most citizens, despite access to evidence, chose to follow the president anyway. Rich doesn't get into why they did so, but I think the reasons boil down to a widespread popular desire to exorcise post-9/11 feelings of shame and vulnerability with the nationalistic pride achieved through the exercise of military might.

Many people who might have supported the Iraq war under different circumstances remained intractably opposed because they believed Bush hadn't proven that Baghdad was making nuclear weapons or working with al-Qaeda. They held this view because, among other reasons, in the months and years after 9/11, they were reading the smart, critical and blessedly spin-proof writings of Frank Rich.

Reviewed by David Greenberg

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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American Born Chinese

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Indie graphic novelist Gene Yang's intelligent and emotionally challenging American Born Chinese is made up of three individual plotlines: the determined efforts of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King to shed his humble roots and be revered as a god; the struggles faced by Jin Wang, a lonely Asian American middle school student who would do anything to fit in with his white classmates; and the sitcom plight of Danny, an All-American teen so shamed by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee (a purposefully painful ethnic stereotype) that he is forced to change schools. Each story works well on its own, but Yang engineers a clever convergence of these parallel tales into a powerful climax that destroys the hateful stereotype of Chin-Kee, while leaving both Jin Wang and the Monkey King satisfied and happy to be who they are. Yang skillfully weaves these affecting, often humorous stories together to create a masterful commentary about race, identity, and self-acceptance that has earned him a spot as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People. The artwork, rendered in a chromatically cool palette, is crisp and clear, with clean white space around center panels that sharply focuses the reader's attention in on Yang's achingly familiar characters. There isn't an adolescent alive who won't be able to relate to Jin's wish to be someone other than who he is, and his gradual realization that there is no better feeling than being comfortable in your own skin.--Jennifer Hubert
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House of Meetings by Martin Amis

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Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin (though he also acknowledges his debt to some later books than his own) he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. He is also agonizing about the botched hostage situation in North Ossetia, ongooing as he writes. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional, as well as a lament for his native country.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, for certain.
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My Secret: A PostSecret Book

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My Secret is Frank Warren's second collection of PostSecret postcards. To give a quick overview of what this is all about - PostSecret is described as a "community art project" where strangers mail Warren a postcard with a very personal secret which they have never shared with anyone before. The Postcard is typically decorated with some sort of artwork that describes the secret being sent. Every Sunday Warren posts them on his PostSecret blog, but he has also published three collections of the postcards. My Secret: A PostSecret Book is the second of the three collections.

What is first notable about My Secret is that it is quite a bit smaller than PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. Without measuring or weighing the book, I would suggest that My Secret is approximately half the size. What this means is that there is far less content for your dollar.

The second thing to point out is that some of these postcards may have been recycled from the first volume. I have not confirmed this by comparing the two books side by side, but some of the postcards were suspiciously familiar. If some of them were not reused, they are very similar to the postcards of volume one with mostly the same content.

This may come across as a knock on My Secret, and in a sense it is, but if we look at My Secret as an individual volume standing alone, the second complaint falls away. My Secret is a collection of some funny and heartbreaking secrets that anyone may have sent in. Considering the volume of postcards Warren has received, any of our neighbors may have a postcard on the website or in a book at any given time. This is what is special about the PostSecret project and in turn about each of the collections. Reading these collections tells the reader that he or she is not alone, that other people have felt this way and that the painful experience is not unique and this can be a way to heal. Reading these collections shows us that we all have something extraordinary about us that our friends and family may never guess. While it is the painful ones which may be most remarkable, there are also funny and happy and silly secrets.

It is ultimately impossible to separate My Secret from the other collections and from the PostSecret project as a whole, so I will close by saying this: My Secret is not as strong of a collection as the first volume. It is smaller and somewhat weaker. But, with that said, it is still worth the half hour or and hour which it will take to go through all of the secrets and get a glimpse into the lives of others, and in turn into ourselves.

-Joe Sherry
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The World Is Flat : A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

From Baghdad, With Love: A Marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
Design Improvements

The news from Iraq keeps getting grimmer, but Iraq veteran Kopelman and journalist Roth (The Man Who Talks to Dogs) tell a tale of radiant joy about Kopelman's efforts to safely transport Lava, the stray dog his Marine unit found in the wreckage of Fallujah, back to the U.S. Though the premise sounds cloying, Kopelman and Roth eschew sentimentality. They don't hesitate to detail the corruption of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. military bureaucracy or the extreme hardships of the Iraqi people. Kopelman's nagging qualms about keeping the dog in violation of military orders throw into relief his efforts to repress his guilt over working so hard to save a dog amid so much human suffering. Most bracing are the frank descriptions of the war's moral vacuum, where terrified men and women—like the dogs that Iraqi insurgents strap with bombs and send charging into the enemy—are driven to commit unspeakable acts they cannot possibly understand. The story of Lava's journey out of Iraq is exciting, but it's to Kopelman and Roth's credit that it's not nearly as harrowing as the story of what the dog left behind. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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House of Meetings by Martin Amis

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Asthma Attack Treatment Thanks To Hypnosis

Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin (though he also acknowledges his debt to some later books than his own) he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. He is also agonizing about the botched hostage situation in North Ossetia, ongooing as he writes. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional, as well as a lament for his native country.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, for certain.
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At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

People : Magazine
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One of the greatest of American stories has found its great chronicler in Taylor Branch. Beginning with Parting the Waters in 1988, followed 10 years later by Pillar of Fire, and closing now with At Canaan's Edge, Branch has given the short life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent revolution he led the epic treatment they deserve. The three books of Branch's America in the King Years trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social history as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands of King's movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, and Diane Nash as compelling as that of his central character.

King's movement may have been nonviolent, but his times were not, and each of Branch's volumes ends with an assassination: JFK, then Malcolm X, and finally King's murder in Memphis. We know that's where At Canaan's Edge is headed, but it starts with King's last great national success, the marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Once again, the violent response to nonviolent protest brought national attention and support to King's cause, and within months his sometime ally Lyndon Johnson was able to push through the Voting Rights Act. But alongside those events, forces were gathering that would pull King's movement apart and threaten his national leadership. The day after Selma's "Bloody Sunday," the first U.S. combat troops arrived in South Vietnam, while five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots began in Los Angeles. As the escalating carnage in Vietnam and the frustrating pace of reform at home drove many in the movement, most notably Stokely Carmichael, away from nonviolence, King kept to his most cherished principle and followed where its logic took him: to war protests that broke his alliance with Johnson and to a widening battle against poverty in the North as well as the South that caused both critics and allies to declare his movement unfocused and irrelevant.

Branch knows that you can't tell King's story without following these many threads, and he spends nearly as much time in Johnson's war councils as he does in the equally fractious meetings of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Branch's knotty, allusive style can be challenging, but it vividly evokes the density of those days and the countless demands on King's manic stoicism. The whirlwind finally slows in the book's final pages for a bittersweet tour through King's last hours at the Lorraine Motel--King horsing around with his brother and friends and calling his mother (in between visits to his mistresses), Jesse Jackson rehearsing movement singers, an FBI agent watching through binoculars from across the street--that complete his work of humanizing a great man forever in danger of flattening into an icon. --Tom Nissley

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At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

The Littlest Hitler - Stories
Magnetic clasps - Clever Clasp.

One of the greatest of American stories has found its great chronicler in Taylor Branch. Beginning with Parting the Waters in 1988, followed 10 years later by Pillar of Fire, and closing now with At Canaan's Edge, Branch has given the short life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent revolution he led the epic treatment they deserve. The three books of Branch's America in the King Years trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social history as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands of King's movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, and Diane Nash as compelling as that of his central character.

King's movement may have been nonviolent, but his times were not, and each of Branch's volumes ends with an assassination: JFK, then Malcolm X, and finally King's murder in Memphis. We know that's where At Canaan's Edge is headed, but it starts with King's last great national success, the marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Once again, the violent response to nonviolent protest brought national attention and support to King's cause, and within months his sometime ally Lyndon Johnson was able to push through the Voting Rights Act. But alongside those events, forces were gathering that would pull King's movement apart and threaten his national leadership. The day after Selma's "Bloody Sunday," the first U.S. combat troops arrived in South Vietnam, while five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots began in Los Angeles. As the escalating carnage in Vietnam and the frustrating pace of reform at home drove many in the movement, most notably Stokely Carmichael, away from nonviolence, King kept to his most cherished principle and followed where its logic took him: to war protests that broke his alliance with Johnson and to a widening battle against poverty in the North as well as the South that caused both critics and allies to declare his movement unfocused and irrelevant.

Branch knows that you can't tell King's story without following these many threads, and he spends nearly as much time in Johnson's war councils as he does in the equally fractious meetings of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Branch's knotty, allusive style can be challenging, but it vividly evokes the density of those days and the countless demands on King's manic stoicism. The whirlwind finally slows in the book's final pages for a bittersweet tour through King's last hours at the Lorraine Motel--King horsing around with his brother and friends and calling his mother (in between visits to his mistresses), Jesse Jackson rehearsing movement singers, an FBI agent watching through binoculars from across the street--that complete his work of humanizing a great man forever in danger of flattening into an icon. --Tom Nissley

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Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems (Hardcover)

The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina

Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems (Hardcover)
Distance Education Helps You Get Ahead.

Throughout George W. Bush's presidency, no columnist has been more perceptive than Frank Rich of the New York Times. A longtime film and drama critic, Rich, for the past decade, has used his insights into performance and stagecraft to explain a political culture increasingly dominated by simulation and spectacle.

Exploring the news each week through the lens of pop culture -- the film "United 93" or the TV show "24," for example -- Rich teases out implications that escape straight-news pundits. The technique allows him to illuminate not only the submerged political currents of mass entertainment but also the theatricality of Washington politics today.

Now Rich has written The Greatest Story Ever Sold, a gripping, witty and devastating indictment of President Bush's reliance on public relations to market his Iraq and counterterrorism policies. Future historians will turn to other works -- by James Bamford, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward -- to understand White House and Pentagon decision-making after 9/11. But Rich's overview will be indispensable for grasping how Americans experienced the events of these years.

For those who have largely opposed Bush's policies, reading Rich's book summons up familiar feelings of outrage and helplessness. Those readers who have tipped from being Bush supporters to critics may gain some wisdom into why they were originally led astray. And even die-hard Bushies may appreciate this volume as a shrewd study in the history of political PR -- if, that is, they can get past Rich's wry, withering tone.

As in his columns, Rich uses cultural touchstones such as Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America and the movie "Chicago" to help us see how populist demagoguery works or how a huckster can con a press pack. But the book's core is a survey of the White House spins and shams since 9/11, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" scare tactics, Colin Powell's Adlai Stevenson impersonation at the United Nations and, of course, Bush's May 2003 "Mission Accomplished" declaration on the flight deck. Rich deftly arranges these and other public moments alongside cases of secret government propaganda -- the payola to working journalists, the fake "video news releases" slipped into local TV news shows -- to construct a persuasive picture of an administration bent on creating "our own reality," as one Bush aide famously put it.

Rich does let a few people off the hook. He's too easy on Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who, while fashioning himself as the second coming of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, has abetted the president's anti-press campaign by jailing one reporter for not playing ball and threatening others.

In my view, Rich lays too much blame for the free hand that Bush has enjoyed at the door of the Fourth Estate. Rich doesn't go as far as some other recent books that lambaste reporters as lapdogs, but he laments that "there was only sporadic digging into the war-ennobled administration by mainstream journalists" and that TV news "barely raised any questions at all."

Obviously, individual outlets, including the New York Times for which Rich writes, erred badly in overplaying claims about the menace Saddam Hussein posed. Some Washington correspondents went native, identifying too closely with insider sources. The tabloid tenor of most broadcast news -- about which Rich has written brilliantly -- fanned Americans' crudest urges.

But Rich's well-researched narrative testifies to the dogged, independent-minded reporting that -- despite this oppressive climate -- revealed official mistakes, lies and violations of law. In recounting the long trail of administration deceptions and blunders, Rich credits the reporters at The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal who discovered them. He cites scoops from outlets as diverse as Roll Call, the National Journal, the Smoking Gun, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Even the generally abysmal TV news shows did some worthy investigation, he tells us: CBS News exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel grilled Bush and other evasive heavies at key moments.

What The Greatest Story Ever Sold illustrates is that most Americans did not back the Iraq invasion because they were credulous, though many were, or even because the administration was dishonest, though it was -- reprehensibly so. In the end, notwithstanding the hype, the truth wasn't all that hard to see; even Bush's misleading claims that Saddam Hussein was about to acquire nukes were debunked on the front pages, as Rich points out, before the invasion began. Yet most citizens, despite access to evidence, chose to follow the president anyway. Rich doesn't get into why they did so, but I think the reasons boil down to a widespread popular desire to exorcise post-9/11 feelings of shame and vulnerability with the nationalistic pride achieved through the exercise of military might.

Many people who might have supported the Iraq war under different circumstances remained intractably opposed because they believed Bush hadn't proven that Baghdad was making nuclear weapons or working with al-Qaeda. They held this view because, among other reasons, in the months and years after 9/11, they were reading the smart, critical and blessedly spin-proof writings of Frank Rich.

Reviewed by David Greenberg

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

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One of the greatest of American stories has found its great chronicler in Taylor Branch. Beginning with Parting the Waters in 1988, followed 10 years later by Pillar of Fire, and closing now with At Canaan's Edge, Branch has given the short life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent revolution he led the epic treatment they deserve. The three books of Branch's America in the King Years trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social history as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands of King's movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, and Diane Nash as compelling as that of his central character.

King's movement may have been nonviolent, but his times were not, and each of Branch's volumes ends with an assassination: JFK, then Malcolm X, and finally King's murder in Memphis. We know that's where At Canaan's Edge is headed, but it starts with King's last great national success, the marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Once again, the violent response to nonviolent protest brought national attention and support to King's cause, and within months his sometime ally Lyndon Johnson was able to push through the Voting Rights Act. But alongside those events, forces were gathering that would pull King's movement apart and threaten his national leadership. The day after Selma's "Bloody Sunday," the first U.S. combat troops arrived in South Vietnam, while five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots began in Los Angeles. As the escalating carnage in Vietnam and the frustrating pace of reform at home drove many in the movement, most notably Stokely Carmichael, away from nonviolence, King kept to his most cherished principle and followed where its logic took him: to war protests that broke his alliance with Johnson and to a widening battle against poverty in the North as well as the South that caused both critics and allies to declare his movement unfocused and irrelevant.

Branch knows that you can't tell King's story without following these many threads, and he spends nearly as much time in Johnson's war councils as he does in the equally fractious meetings of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Branch's knotty, allusive style can be challenging, but it vividly evokes the density of those days and the countless demands on King's manic stoicism. The whirlwind finally slows in the book's final pages for a bittersweet tour through King's last hours at the Lorraine Motel--King horsing around with his brother and friends and calling his mother (in between visits to his mistresses), Jesse Jackson rehearsing movement singers, an FBI agent watching through binoculars from across the street--that complete his work of humanizing a great man forever in danger of flattening into an icon. --Tom Nissley

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Wolves by Emily Gravett

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005

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This book has to be reviewed on two levels. First as a retrospective of Annie Leibovitz's photography from 1990 - 2005. On that level, the presentation is sumptuous and greatly enhances even the most mediocre photos. Few of these photos are as breathtaking as much of the work Leibowitz produced in earlier years. Most of the photos would, in fact, be indistinguishable from the work of thousands of others photographers were it not for their famous subjects, such as Al Pacino and Willie Nelson.

One troubling aspect of this collection for me was Leibowitz's seeming imitation of the styles of other photographers from the past such as Dianne Arbus and even Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous creator of the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph of the Will". Her portrait of the muscular torso of Sylvester Stallone is terribly reminiscent of Riefenstahl's style. Likewise her portraits of two Las Vegas dancers, resplendent in their bejeweled costumes, is compared with portraits of them as ordinary middle-aged women without makeup. Effective, but in many ways a reflection of Arbus's famous style. Portraits of Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf look like those from virtually any high-end portrait studio.

The vitality and originality I used to associate with Annie Leibovitz is largely absent in this collection. On the whole, it is a disappointing portfolio.

Leibovitz perhaps intended this collection to be a different kind of statement, truly a statement about her "life". And it is, uncomfortably so perhaps.

There are many, many photographs of Susan Sontag, Leibvoitz's partner. Sontag is remembered (and reviled) by many for her strident anti-Americanism. It is difficult to reconcile these "loving" picures of Sontag taken by her lover with the Sontag who exorciated Americans very shortly after 9/11 and told them they deserved the disaster they got. Hard to put away feelings of animosity while seeing so many photos of her in Leibvoitz's book.

Leibovitz also includes many photos of her family. These are nothing more than snapshots for the most part, no matter how deftly they have been manipulated in the printing process. (I am really curious as to whether Leibovitz does her own printing. Much of the impact of many of her photos in this collection owes to their printing and the large presentation size, not their content or composition.)

In some ways, Leibovitz would have been better served by putting all of her family pictures into a separate section. As such it would have chronicled the physical decline of her parents while their children and grandchildren grew and would have been a powerful testament to familial love.

Leibovitz makes it clear that this is a deeply personal statement. She says "I cried for a month. I didn't realize until later how far the work on the book had taken me through the grieving proces. It's the closest thing to who I am that I've ever done." That sentiment may indeed account for the ordinariness of the photos in this book. Leibovitz is showing us her life - as the title implies - and not simply showcasing her best work. On the other hand, that presumes the admirer of Leibovitz's photography is interested in her personal life with Sontag and family and not just her photography. I'm sure some will enjoy this collection: I did not find it especially noteworthy.
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