Magazines: Baiting and Other Pleasures

The New York Review of Books is at least a terrific idea: a fortnightly collection of articles about books; not just articles, but long, sprawling essays; not just about books, but about important books, books that embody the leading ideas of the day; reviews that aim at definitive judgments, their length permitting the reader to watch reviewers of distinction working out, with leisurely intricacy, their evaluations.

It all started, of course (I try to sound as if I knew it all along), with some newspaper strike or other, a decade or so ago, when the absence of the New York Times Book Review afforded a handful of venturesome intellectuals the high tide of opportunity they’d needed to launch the enterprise they’d been dreaming of. They threw the first issue of The New York Re view together on newsprint, and the rest is history (drolly recounted by Philip Nobile in his book Intellectual Skywriting). NYR regularly offers well, Names: Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Stuart Hampshire, Gore Vidal, Anthony Lewis, V. S. Pritchett, Murray Kempton . . . and I could go on and on, till your eyes popped right out of your head, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that NYR is partly an august intellectual tribunal, and partly a literary Muscle Beach; and an author who gets reviewed in it, if he escapes a capital sentence, may get some sand kicked in his face. Then again, he may get both.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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The New York Review of Books is at least a terrific idea: a fortnightly collection of articles about books; not just articles, but long, sprawling essays; not just about books, but about important books, books that embody the leading ideas of the day; reviews that aim at definitive judgments, their length permitting the reader to watch reviewers of distinction working out, with leisurely intricacy, their evaluations.

It all started, of course (I try to sound as if I knew it all along), with some newspaper strike or other, a decade or so ago, when the absence of the New York Times Book Review afforded a handful of venturesome intellectuals the high tide of opportunity they’d needed to launch the enterprise they’d been dreaming of. They threw the first issue of The New York Re view together on newsprint, and the rest is history (drolly recounted by Philip Nobile in his book Intellectual Skywriting). NYR regularly offers well, Names: Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Stuart Hampshire, Gore Vidal, Anthony Lewis, V. S. Pritchett, Murray Kempton . . . and I could go on and on, till your eyes popped right out of your head, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that NYR is partly an august intellectual tribunal, and partly a literary Muscle Beach; and an author who gets reviewed in it, if he escapes a capital sentence, may get some sand kicked in his face. Then again, he may get both.