Salvage Heart

What elf can move
this lively and quick?

Labels: Christmas, domesticity

You had to put Frosty on the edge
before you pretended to care.

Courtesy of the rooftop decor at Frock on NE Alberta.

Labels: northeast, Portland, snow, snowman, winter

Posts are few and far between right now....

Taylor Clark's Starbucked got the famous-critic critique in this week's NYTBR (and a first-chapter reprint), courtesy of P.J. O'Rourke. It's the sort of feedback that might be nice to get at a writer's workshop, for a first draft, but pretty ugly sprawled across two pages in the Sunday Times.

The lead sets us up:

"There’s a great story to be told about the success of Starbucks. But we’ll have to wait to hear it from somebody other than Taylor Clark."

then

"This is a shame because Clark is an enthusiastic young writer who has the seat of his intellectual pants hooked on the horns of an interesting conflict."

O'Rourke gradually gets around to the upshot: he likes part two of the book, he likes Clark's writing, he likes Clark. His Upfront at the beginning of the NYTBR pull-out is a somewhat interesting read on how to review books:

“I read something I’m reviewing the same way I read other things except more so. That is, I already keep a commonplace book (a file folder, really) for quotations, ideas, information, etc. If I’m going to write a review I mark the work for myself, but besides underlining what interests me I also underline what — as far as I can tell — interested the author. By the time I’m done I have an outline for the review. All I have to do is figure out a smart-aleck lead sentence and a wiseacre ending.”

But the condescension, and the hundreds of words in assault of the book's premise...ouch.

In the p.r. school of "don't read it, measure it," Clark can take heart. that while the review doesn't crack the top-10 most-emailed this week, it sits pretty at #2 in most blogged. And, while probably not the reviewer he would have preferred, it is at least one most readers will have heard of.

Being a NBCC-member (yes, Jane Ciabattari, I got the e-mail...dues were due March 1st...but I sent my membership money to avantguild...they had better party photos...), I should have some sort of critical assessment. I don't, except to say that PJ represents a sensibility for whom the book was not likely written. It is not a business book, but a culture book, and Clark does well with that.

Labels: books, New York Times, P.J. O'Rourke, review, Starbucked, Taylor Clark