Dan Brown Goes to Washington

Critics divided over Bossypants as autobiography

(NEWSER) - It’s no surprise that Tina Fey’s autobiography, Bossypants, is hilarious; on that much critics agree. But there’s some dissent over whether it does its job as a memoir:

• “The most successful autobiographies demand a certain amount of psychic heavy lifting, risk taking, and interrogation of one’s ideas; Fey will have none of it,” writes Anna Holmes in Newsweek . “Edging up to difficult truths and skipping away may make for sophisticated sitcoms, but it doesn’t make for satisfying memoir writing.”

Biography seeks to end hagiography of the leader of Indian independence

(NEWSER) - Mohandas Gandhi may have been a great man, leading India to independence, but he was also a great jerk, leading a life of racism, self-promotion, sexual weirdness, and cruelty—or so says the new biography Great Soul, by former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld. Gandhi's early biographers dubbed him a "moral demi-god," but Lelyveld's book shows a much more human image. "Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual," writes Andrew Roberts in his review in the Wall Street Journal , "professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals." More»

Karin N. Calvo-Goller says the 4-paragraph review hurt her reputation

(NEWSER) - No author likes a bad review, but one academic decided to do something about it—she sued. Even more unusual, the Israel-based writer of an English-language book by a Dutch publisher that was reviewed in 2007 by a German professor for an American journal decided to sue in a French court. So what horrific things did the reviewer say about Karin N. Calvo-Goller's The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court? More»

The New York Times Book Review picks out its favorites

(NEWSER) - The year's coming to a close and you know what that means: Best-of lists! The New York Times Book Review kicks things off with a list of the year's top books. Including: Fiction

• Freedom, Jonathan Franzen—“Even richer and deeper” than The Corrections, this Bush-era Midwestern family saga perfectly reflects the “story of millennial America.”
• Room, Emma Donoghue—“Donoghue has created one of the pure triumphs of recent fiction” with this arresting tale, told by a child narrator who’s trapped with his mother in an 11-by-11-foot room.
• A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan—This “virtuosic rock ‘n’ roll novel,” follows 13 different characters across some 40 years, yet combines their stories “into an artful whole, irradiated by a Proustian feel for loss, regret and the ravages of love.”

Former supporter cites racism, politics, judicial activism

(NEWSER) - Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens is making clear for the first time why he switched course on the death penalty in 2008, calling it unconstitutional, the New York Times reports. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Stevens, who supported capital punishment in 1976, reveals his revised belief that racism, politics, and unfairness plague the system. More»