The problem of the interesting failure

My earlier post on "The Kite Runner" got me thinking about the difficulty of writing about what I call "the interesting failure." It's when a book is very good, but still has profound flaws.
Maureen Corrigan is a book reviewer I like a lot; usually I listen to her book reviews on Fresh Air, the radio show from National Public Radio.
She recently reviewed the new novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of "The Remains of the Day," which became a touching film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson). Her mixed review definitely fell into that category, and it was very interesting to hear how she handled it in a review. Listen to her review here.

The problem with endings

I just finished The Kite Runner, which is No. 1 on Book Sense's bestseller list. (Booksense.com is the web site of independent booksellers and a great place to get reading ideas. )
"The Kite Runner" is the story of an upper-class boy growing up in Afghanistan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His mother is dead, his father is withholding, and his best friend is the servant's son.
The beginning of this book is amazing, startlingly strong, utterly gripping.
The middle part is interesting, very good.
The ending is bad, too many coincidences and loose ends coming together, almost over the top.
Don't you hate it when that happens? Where was the author's editor? All he needed to do was throttle back a little bit.
On the whole, though, the good outweighed the bad, because the good was so very good.

Blink review

I wrote a review of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Read the whole thing here.
Here's how it starts:

When we contemplate the power of unconscious thought, it’s usually in the context of swirling sexual desire or perhaps a drug-fueled reverie—think Oedipus, Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali, or Timothy Leary. But Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Blink, makes the case that unconscious thought can help us with practical decisions in both work and life. According to Gladwell’s hypothesis, our brains are powerful organic computers that arrive at highly technical yet accurate decisions without having to make much of an effort.

Librarian by day, BATGIRL by night!

I just learned that superhero Batgirl's alter ego is Barbara Gordon, librarian!
Yippee! Now I have another cool comics role model to praise alongside intrepid reporter Lois Lane.
Check out Batgirl's history at fan web sites here and here.

Comic books are kind of like the soaps ... The characters have long, complicated life stories with all kinds of improbable plot twists. So Barbara Gordon starts out as Batgirl, but then she gets shot by The Joker in a special one-issue comic called "Batman: The Killing Joke" by Alan Moore. Moore, by the way, is one of the most celebrated and respected comic writers of our day. He wrote the postmodern apocalyptic classic, The Watchmen. I actually have a copy of The Killing Joke, which I bought when it came out way back in 1988. (Read a quick synopsis and review of The Killing Joke here.)

So Barbara Jordon is shot by the Joker and left paralyzed, which means Batgirl's crime-fighting career is thrown for a serious curve. But no! Barbara Jordon becomes ORACLE! As a fan web site puts it:

She used her researcher's talents from her job as a librarian and a grant from the Wayne Foundation to begin anew, this time using computers as her library, community and her battlefield.

(Here's the link. Recall that the Wayne Foundation refers to Bruce Wayne, Batman's millionaire playboy alter ego.)

So Barbara Jordon enters the 21st century as Oracle, librarian, computer diva and super-researcher extraordinaire!

I love it!

The Art of the News Obit

When they're at their best, nobody does a better news obituary than The New York Times.
(When they're at their worst, they're dang boring, but that's a post for another day.)
The news obituary is a fine art: It should be comprehensive yet compact, objective, even critical, but still respectful and providing a sense of closure.
The NYT did a fine, fine job this week on the news obit of Pope John Paul II. Perhaps you could argue that it does not fulfill my criteria of compactness -- it is quite long -- but it is interesting and comprehensive. I read it Sunday afternoon, not on the Internet, but in the newspaper itself, and it was pleasant reading.
Read the entire obit here.
In this excerpt, the writer Robert D. McFadden describes the assassination attempt on the Pope's life. Notice how he neatly summarizes the investigation that concludes years later:

John Paul's life as a robust, traveling teacher-pope appeared to have been altered on May 13, 1981, when a 23-year-old Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, shot him as he rode in an open car before 10,000 people in St. Peter's Square. Bystanders seized the gunman as the pope's car sped away to Gemelli Hospital. Shot in the abdomen, right arm and left hand, he underwent five hours of surgery, and part of an intestine was removed.

Investigators searching Mr. Agca's past learned that he was a murderer who had escaped from a Turkish prison in 1979 and had ties to a neo-Nazi group, the Gray Wolves. But no evidence of a conspiracy to kill the pope was found. Mr. Agca was tried by the Italian authorities and sentenced to life in prison.

The assailant later said the shooting was a Soviet-inspired plot involving Bulgarian and Turkish agents, and investigators uncovered tantalizing details that seemed to support some of his assertions. But an Italian court in 1986 found the evidence ambiguous and acquitted three Bulgarians and three Turks of conspiracy in the case. A link between the attack and the Bulgarian government was often asserted, but never proved.

Humility, the forgotten virtue

The ever sensible Don Wycliff, public editor for the Chicago Tribune, writes about changes in newspaper readership in his column this week:

Besides the overwhelming shift by readers from telephone and snail-mail contacts to e-mail, the most notable change I've seen is the willingness of people--readers, commentators, activists, everybody--to eschew humility and display what can only be called unabashed moral and intellectual arrogance.

I thought that these displays couldn't get more shameless than they were during Bill Clinton's presidency, when it seemed all restraint had been lost and all of his critics were ready to pick up stones and have at him, presumably after having examined their own consciences and found themselves "without sin."

But the advent of George W. Bush has given rise to a viciousness and loss of restraint unparalleled in my experience. People seem to have lost completely their moral compass.

Read the column in its entirety here.