From Literary Hub, December 12:
“With the kids jingle bellingAnd everyone telling you be of good cheer…”
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Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year.
As longtime readers of this annual feature will know, each year in the run up to the holidays, we (the normally benevolent stewards of BookMarks.reviews) make a sacrificial offering to the literary criticism gods in the hope of a bountiful review harvest for the coming year.
Among the books being flung into the fiery pit this time around: Walter Isaacson’s “dull, insight-free doorstop” biography of Elon Musk; Paris Hilton’s “vapid and vaporous” memoir; Tom Hanks’ “bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction”; and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “hollow PR exercise.”
So here they are, in all their gory, gut-punchin’ glory: the most scathing book reviews of 2023.
“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer … There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter …
To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best …
There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your savior turns out to be the world’s loudest crank? So who or what is responsible for Elon Musk? ‘Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,’ Musk says, and there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room. It is not a coincidence that the back jacket features a fully erect penis (some may argue it is actually one of Musk’s rockets, but I remain unconvinced) …
Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.”
–Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (The Guardian)
“The overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard—someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly …
All the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core. A former military prosecutor, DeSantis is undeniably diligent and disciplined … Even the title, with its awkward feint at boldness while clinging to the safety of cliché, suggests the anxiety of an ambitious politician who really, really wants to run for president in 2024 and knows he needs the grievance vote … For the most part, The Courage to Be Free is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT …
At around 250 pages, this isn’t a particularly long book, but it’s padded with such banalities … Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in The Courage to Be Free is chilling—unfree and scary.
–Jennifer Szalai on Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival (The New York Times)
“…a book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is—at moments—very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire. It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing …
What kind of person insists on an air-clearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say. Exactly the same kind of person, in fact, who would talk about reconciliation in the same breath as they publicly slag off their family … Such things are made all the more jarring by the yawning gap between the way Harry speaks and the way his ghost, JR Moehringer, writes…I suppose he wishes he were Ben Lerner, or some other hip young literary American gunslinger, rather than having to channel a raging Sloane who must look up the word compere in a dictionary when his brother asks him to be one at his wedding and whose epigraph from Faulkner—’The past is never dead. It’s not even past’—he found on brainyquote.com. Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something …
Here we are. Penguin Random House has helped him out and we can only hope he’s happy with his end of the deal, a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed.”....
–Rachel Cooke on Prince Harry’s Spare (The Guardian)
....MUCH MORE, so much more
