Harsh reviewers beware: A senior lecturer at the Academic Center of Law and Business in Israel is taking a critic to court over a review of her book. Karin Calvo-Goller wrote to the editor of the website where the review was published, saying, “I am…

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French Author Sues Over Book Review

This week’s Book Review introduces revamped best-seller lists, the result of many months of planning, research and design.

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ArtsBeat: Introducing E-Book Best Sellers

What an extraordinary 24-hour period it’s been in the world of the law. First, on Tuesday, a federal judge in California took a rare tour of the Golden State’s new ($900,000) execution facilities at San Quentin State Prison. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who halted capital punishment in California in 2006 because of concerns about poorly trained executioners carrying out ”cruel and unusual” executions, spent at least part of his time on site explaining to assembled reporters why he wasn’t involved in the latest death penalty controversy: California’s  public search for sodium thiopental , one of the drugs commonly used in the three-drug lethal injection “cocktail.”   Then, late yesterday, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives failed in an effort to extend three key provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the counter-terrorism statutes enacted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The provisions ultimately will be extended — before the end of the month — but what a difference nine years make. I still remember the chaos and speed which surrounded the initial passage of this landmark  legislation, signed by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001, like it was yesterday . Don’t you?  Next, on Wednesday on Capitol Hill, 73 (or 74, depending upon whose count you believe) Democratic lawmakers asked  Supreme Court Justice Clarence to recuse himself from any future deliberation or decision over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because of his wife Virginia’s work with conservative advocacy groups opposed to the new health care laws. Justice Thomas won’t do anything about it — just you watch — and his public silence from the bench is sure to deepen.  But the political move is a blunt sign of how little lawmakers think of Team Thomas’ inadequate financial reporting  and  Virginia Thomas’ new round of conservative activism . Then, just a short while later, the House unanimously passed a measure naming a new federal courthouse in Arizona after slain U.S. Chief District Judge John M. Roll, one of the victims of the Tucson massacre last month. Earlier, the Senate also endorsed passage. The irony, of course, is that all Judge Roll wanted from lawmakers were more judges confirmed more quickly. In fact, he went to see Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) that fateful Jan. 8 morning to talk with her and her staff about the ” judicial emergency ” now befalling Arizona and other states. Never mind the name of the courthouse. If Congress wants to pay tribute to such a brave man, the Senate ought to fill his state’s empty benches, at the very least. In Virginia, the state’s first black chief justice , Leroy R. Hassell, Sr, died at age 55. The Commonwealth’s Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, meanwhile, filed his brief (and when I say “brief” I mean “political manifesto”) with the Supreme Court asking the justices to expedite their review of the aforementioned health care law. Ain’t gonna happen. But while you are awaiting top-shelf Commerce Clause analysis you can always follow the Hollywood circus that is Lindsay Lohan, the child-star-gone-rogue charged Wednesday with grand theft for allegedly stealing a necklace. And if that’s not tabloidy enough for you, feel free to follow Italy’s prosecution of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; authorities there announced Wednesday that they want to try the PM pronto for having sex with a 17-year-old prostitute and then trying to intervene on her behalf with local police. All this and it’s not yet 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

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You Don’t See This Every Day

The Book Review’s Paper Cuts blog has joined ArtsBeat.

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ArtsBeat: Paper Cuts Joins ArtsBeat

by John Tierney It may be that, like me, you don’t quite know what to make of articles that have appeared recently about the state of contemporary secondary and post-secondary education. But maybe you can !  If so, help me sort through it. I’ve spent my entire professional life as a teacher — for over twenty years at the college level, and for the last nine years at a high school.  Despite all that, I still don’t know what to make of all this. So, I’m just going to call your attention here to some disparate things I’ve read in recent months, without trying to weave them together in a coherent essay.  If you have thoughts, please let me hear them. An article  in Thursday’s  New York Times  reported on a survey showing that large numbers of  college freshmen consider themselves depressed and thoroughly stressed-out; many are already using, or are in need of, psychiatric medication.  It’s easy to understand how this could be true: college life can be stressful, especially for freshmen who are making all sorts of life adjustments.  And as Tamar Lewin, the article’s author, notes, “The economy has only added to the stress, not just because of financial pressures on their parents but also because the students are worried about their own college debt and job prospects when they graduate.”   (Anecdotal evidence — and some of the reporting noted below — certainly suggests that there are lots of college students who aren’t stressed-out at all.  Strung-out , maybe, but not stressed.  Or maybe their stress comes from being strung-out.  Who knows?) The same article notes that while many students give a thumbs-down about their emotional health, they think they’re pretty swell in other ways.  Lewin writes: “While first-year students’ assessments of their emotional health were declining [from the results in earlier surveys], their ratings of their own drive to achieve, and academic ability, have been going up, and reached a record high in 2010, with about three-quarters saying they were above average.”  (That’s America for you: we all think we’re above-average drivers, too.  We all think we’re residents of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”  But I digress.)  Many of us don’t really know ourselves well.  To wit: Last week, an Associated Press article by Eric Gorski  reported: “A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.” Gorski’s article reported on findings of a new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa titled  Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses .   Apparently, Arum and Roksa spread the blame, pointing to (1) students who don’t study much and seek easy courses, and (2) a culture at colleges and universities that values research over good teaching.  Doesn’t sound good, does it?  Keep reading.  It gets worse. Last August, I saw this review in the Wall Street Journal of a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus,  Higher Education?  How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It .  That subtitle really sticks it to the colleges.  I haven’t read the book, but according to the revealing review, Hacker and Dreifus skewer higher education.  The reviewer, MarK Bauerlein, who teaches at Emory University, summarizes their argument this way: “[C]olleges and universities serve the people who work there more than the parents and taxpayers who pay for ‘higher education’ or the students who so desperately need it.”  On the point above, about colleges “valuing research over teaching,” Bauerlein writes (from a position of experience): “A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this ‘research’ is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild’s need to credentialize its members. In any case, time spent for research is time taken away from students. The remoteness of professors may help explain why about 30% of enrolling students drop out of college only a few months after arriving.”   Related to each of the previous two items is this this article that I saw in the New York Times last July, reporting that American colleges and universities are spending a diminishing share of their budgets on instruction and more on administration and recreational facilities for students. This is easy to believe.  Have you taken a look lately at a directory of administration (or an organization chart) for a college or university?  There are multiple associate provosts, deputy associates, dozens of deans for this and that, associate deans, etc.  It’s quite remarkable, and a far cry from what it was like a mere 25 years ago.  It’s ridiculously expensive, duplicative, and (I suspect) sclerotic.  It reminds me of what happened in the federal executive branch (and in many states) over the past half century, with the proliferation there of under secretaries, assistant secretaries, etc., leading to diluted accountability and slower governmental processes.  [See, on this topic, the terrific book by Paul C. LIght and Paul A. Volcker, A Government Ill-Executed , and Light's earlier book, Thickening Government. ]  As for the expenditures on fancy recreational facilities for students: I understand the need colleges have to compete for students.  But this rec-race is contributing to what Richard K. Vedder, a professor at Ohio University who studies the economics of higher education, has properly called “the country-clubization of the American university.”  Maybe that development also has something to do with the following revelations. Last summer the Boston Globe reported on the results of a study by two University of California economists who found that “over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping.”  The study found this to be true not just of a particular demographic, but across the board: “No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all ability levels are studying less.”   Are they working out at the rec-plex or doing other things? According to one observer, the decline in studying probably comes less from kids spending too much time on fancy fitness equipment than from their exuberant pursuit of drugs, sex, and rock-’n-roll — and alcohol.  A book by Craig Brandon, titled  The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It   describes America’s “alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses” as education-free zones. Let’s repeat that: EDUCATION-FREE ZONES.  Admittedly, I haven’t read Brandon’s book, and the Wall Street Journal, where I read this review of it, may not be the most reliable source for information having to do with higher education, such is the antipathy of many conservatives to contemporary college life.  Still, the book, though obviously somewhat sensationalistic, comes to the same conclusion as the scholarly work of Hacker and Dreifus (above) and confirms the scary view of college life that Tom Wolfe painted in his 2004 novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons .  Now, all that adds up to a fairly disturbing view of contemporary college life. I retired from a tenured professorship in 2000, so I cannot fairly say that I am totally up-to-date on what’s happening on college campuses.  But I’m willing to say that none of this surprises me. It rings true. I know this post is long, but permit me to call attention to one final point — this one about the life of high-school students, about which less is written (or, at least, less seems to appear in the popular press).  Some of you probably have seen, or are familiar with, a provocative documentary film that’s making the rounds among educators and high-school audiences across the country.  It’s called “Race to Nowhere.”   I recently saw it.  It depicts the hyper-competitive environment that America’s high-school students face today.  (Here’s a recent article from the Boston Globe about the film and the reaction to it from students, educators, and parents.)   According to the film, the race to get into the “best” colleges leaves students physically exhausted, psychically and emotionally depleted.  The pressure is pervasive and relentless. Moreover, students say, the heavy current emphasis throughout elementary and secondary education on standardized testing has them cramming facts into their heads for years, ready to be regurgitated on exams.  But they don’t really learn anything.  (Maybe that self-understanding is what leads many of them, when they get to college, to be depressed and more stressed. See the first item above.)   So, what do I make of this?  Again, I’m not sure.  I teach at an “elite” (effete?) independent school for girls in the Boston area.  The tuition is in excess of thirty grand. So, this is not a typical American high school.  (That’s partly why I need help sorting all this out.)   Some of the students I teach work really hard.  They’re good, diligent students. I’m happy to teach them and am proud of their accomplishments.   But, my sense is that most of the students at this school spend enormous amounts of time watching television, checking out Facebook, and otherwise engaging in totally unproductive activity. They certainly don’t read anything!  In fact, I would say that the number one problem in contemporary American education is that students do not read enough.  Their reading comprehension is horrible.  Their vocabularies are impoverished.  They cannot talk about anything outside their own closed little worlds.  Now, maybe my sense of this is distorted by the peculiar environment in which I find myself working.   But I have the uncomfortable feeling that this larger problem — the waste of time on television and Facebook and video games, and, worst of all, the absence of any reading life — is endemic among young people today.   If so, we’re in big trouble.  They don’t know anything and, worse yet, they seem uninterested in anything.  What to do about this? The Tiger Moms of the world may, or may not, have the right approach.  But the rest of us haven’t exactly figured it out, either. 

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Contemporary Student Life

In a recent essay for the Book Review, I wrote about the art of the very long sentence. Many readers sent me their own favorite examples.

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Paper Cuts: The Art of the Very Long Sentence

David Hockney’s new show is alive. Every few days he creates a painting with his iPad’s Brushes application, then emails it to identical devices on display at Paris’s Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation, where his “Fresh Flowers” exhibition runs through January 30. As of this writing, there are over 300 pictures and counting. Story continues after the gallery. Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow Throughout his career, Hockney has managed to constantly reinvent himself while retaining his artistic DNA. Famous for his crisp, languid depictions of poolside California, he has forayed into photomontage, fax art, art history, and, in the 80s, digital drawing on the computer program Quantel Paintbox . This latest, ever-evolving exhibition reflects his protean character. Twenty of the images on display are animated from start to finish, and on the foundation’s website you can watch the deft finger-strokes accumulate into a fully-realized product, a dynamic still-life. Like most of us, these paintings were conceived in bed. Two years ago, watching the dawn tread across the North Sea and toward his Bridlington home, Hockney realized he could quickly catch the moment on his iPod (he has since then upgraded to the iPad). As he tells Lawrence Weschler in The New York Review of Books , “in the old days, one never could [capture the light], because, of course, ordinarily it would be too dark to see the paints; or else, if you turned on a light so as to see them, you’d lose the subtle gathering tones of the coming sun.” Brushes frees the artist from the constraints of time and supplies. The iPad’s backlight lets you paint at any time of day, the app’s color wheel provides every pigment, and its very nature renders set-up and clean-up obsolete. How this device would have simplified life for Monet, who was so attuned to changes in sunlight that seven minutes was the limit for one of his Poplar series , and so attuned to the elements that he traveled with separate canvases for all types of wind and weather. For weeks he awoke at 3:30 a.m. and trundled off to the Seine, a canvas under each arm, to catch the transient, raking dawn. With an iPad he could have loafed until six before ambling to the river with a device no larger than his sketchpad. Brushes would certainly have expedited his draftsmanship, but whether it would have improved his paintings is another question. Even Monet would be hard-pressed to achieve that soft, dappled look on an iPad, which lends itself more to razored precision. You can tailor your line any way you want — by color, thickness, opacity, even by the correlation between the speed of your finger and the evanescence of the mark — but there’s only one way to draw, and that’s with the line. In its shortcomings, the app reminds me of Facebook: just as the social networking site lets you explore limitless friendships in a limited way, so Brushes gives you an infinite palette to be used in finite ways. The commercial art world seems to think the jury’s still out about Hockney’s iPad period, according to Charlie Scheips, the show’s curator. Some have dismissed it as his latest dalliance. Yet for Scheips, the opinions of the art world miss the point of a show about the creative use of a new, intimate medium. “Fresh Flowers” began with Hockney creating an image and zipping it off to a dozen friends. Though the paintings look like fluorescent Matisses, in spirit they’re descended from Mail Art, the absurdist movement pioneered by Ray Johnson and his New York School of Correspondence in the 1960s. That band of artsy pranksters made works out of anything — rubber stamps, postmarks, signatures, photocopies — as long as it fit on a postcard they could send to the world. Their philosophy rebelled against the haughty hierarchy of galleries, but in 1970 Ray Johnson organized an exhibition at The Whitney . Hockney’s current exhibition presents a similar paradox: this everyman’s app art, which inherently can’t be auctioned off, is on display in the former studio of Yves St. Laurent, the home of Haute Couture and the height of exclusivity. While his digital exhibition challenges the norms of commercial art, Hockney still has to make money. There are no originals to sell for ungodly sums. You could print the images, but on regular paper, without their luminous screen, they look wan and watery. The best option for selling them, Scheips suggests, might be an app catalogue, which would let us browse Hockney’s entire iOeuvre. That way, each new image would come to us–with no gallery or curator required — as the latest course in a moveable feast.

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Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Hockney’s iPad Paintings

Complete contents of the Book Review since 1997.

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The New York Times Book Review: Back Issues

Henry McLeish backs Scottish Premier League proposals for a two-tier top flight with 10 teams in each division in the second part of his review.

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McLeish review backs two-tier SPL

The Book Review picks the year’s best fiction and nonfiction.

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Holiday Gift Guide: The 10 Best Books of 2010

Given the sensationalism in mainstream US news media coverage of alleged sexual impropriety charges filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Sweden, it’s no surprise that other significant news about America involving that Scandinavian nation is being left uncovered. In early November, Sweden called on the US to end the death penalty and to improve conditions in maximum security prisons, as the United States went through its first-ever Universal Periodic Review by the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. read more

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Linn Washington, Jr. | America Criticized For Human Rights Abuses

The Book Review’s annual list of outstanding works.

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Holiday Gift Guide: 100 Notable Books of 2010

Let the awards season begin! The National Board of Review, made up of a shadowy group of industry professionals who normally do not make themselves known, have revealed their favorites of the year, giving The Social Network major kudos in the Best Feature, Best Director (David Fincher), Best Actor (Jesse Eisenberg) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) categories. Here’s where you might say, “Um, so who are these people again, and why are their picks important?” We’re not entirely sure how to answer that question, except to say that the NBR winners are widely regarded as the first Oscar pre-cursor; an initial snapshot at which films professionals in the entertainment industry think were the best of the year. Keep in mind not all of their picks have lined… Read More Read Comments

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National Board of Review Calls ‘Social Network’ Best Movie of 2010

And they’re off: The National Board Review announced this year’s picks for the top movie categories, and the best-film award went to The Social Network. The film also won best director for David Fincher, best screenplay, and best actor for Jesse…

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Social Network Wins Oscar Bellwether

The U.S. would do well to accept the country as it is.

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Review U.S. policy toward North Korea