Mary Elizabeth Williams writes on Salon.com her views of the “Twitter controversy” regarding Alice Hoffman’s angry response to Roberta Silman’s scathing book review. Williams also mentions past exchanges between authors and reviewers, showing that while Hoffman may not be right, she is certainly not alone.
Update:
Williams brings up further feuds as evidence of the lengths authors go to in retaliation to a harsh reviewer.
The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly
ISBN-13: 978-1409102038
Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles defence attorney, inherits the clients of his dead colleague, Jerry Vincent. One of them is Hollywood mogul Walter Elliot, accused of brutally killing his wife and her lover. A win could propel him into the big league.
But Jerry Vincent was murdered. And detective Harry Bosch is convinced that the murderer was one of Vincent’s clients. Will Haller live to enjoy his new found success?
Not only does The Brass Verdict see the return of Mickey Haller, featured in one of Connelly’s most successful novels, The Lincoln Lawyer, but also Harry Bosch, a veteran of a dozen previous stories. As the story is narrated by Haller, we only see Bosch through Haller’s eyes, casting a familiar character in a new light.
As tightly plotted as his previous bestsellers, Connelly shows no signs of slipping. There are numerous twists and turns that should keep the reader guessing until the final pages. Newcomers may be advised to read The Lincoln Lawyer first. If you do, then it shouldn’t be long before you have to track down The Brass Verdict as well.
I was surprised to read about the recent drama over a review of Alice Hoffman’s latest novel The Story Sisters, in The Boston Globe. After reading a negative review of her book written by critic Roberta Silman, Hoffman lashed out on Twitter, publishing the reviewer’s phone number, and encouraging her fans to harass her. I witnessed similar behavior from Hoffman last week on Facebook, where she lashed out at a reviewer during an online interview about her book in a way that made me uncomfortable, and left me wondering if Hoffman;s success had truly gone to her head. The reviewer had made the obviously unpardonable sin of getting one of Hoffman’s character’ names wrong during the interview, and Hoffman went momentarily insane. So, although I was surprised to see her recent behavior on Twitter, I wasn’t shocked. It does seem strange though, that an author with a career as long and as successful as Hoffman’s would react this way, encouraging her fans to attack a 70 year old woman, and harass her at home. It’s one thing to disagree with a review, but quite another to throw a public temper tantrum and act like a overindulged, spoiled brat.
In this economy, and with the business of publishing the way it is right now, I am grateful that anyone is reading or reviewing my books at all. A little humility might do Alice Hoffman some good. After all, she has a career as a bestselling author that many novelists would kill for–myself included. Not everyone can, and will be a fan of your work, and one shouldn’t write simply to be praised–or loved universally. That’s what family and children are for—not literature. Now, truth be told, I’m not the greatest at taking criticism myself, however, I would never dream of publishing a blogger or reviewer’s phone number or address over a bad review, although I have access to both. To do so simply because a reviewer as less than thrilled with your work is unreasonable, not to mention downright immature. I have had my differences with one or two reviewers over certain negative reviews of my work, and have in fact regretted contacting them privately over it. But, then again, I’m a young novelist at the beginning of her career–not a seasoned veteran who should know better. After all these years in publishing, and almost universal praise for her work, Hoffman’s behavior is baffling–and to this reader anyway, patently offensive
*Update: Hoffman issued a statement through her publicist today apologizing “if” she had offended “anyone” through her actions. Bad move, Alice, and strikingly insincere to boot. First off, it is Silman that Hoffman needs to apologize to–not nameless, faceless Tweeters. Secondly, take some responsibility for your actions–don’t say “if,” but call it like it is and admit that your behavior was, in fact, offensive and wrong.
I’ll climb off my soapbox now . . .
“A summer in Jerusalem” by Chochana Miller Boukhobza (father of bread)
This French novel is the first of Chochana Miller Boukhobza published in 1986; she was 26 years old. She described Jerusalem in captivating details. A Jewish family from Tunisia decided to immigrate to France; the family lived the immigrant adventure of wants and hard life in a poor quarter of “Chemin Vert” in Paris. The elder girl (Sarah) was 17 when she exhorted her family to relocate to Israel. Three years later, as the family settle down in Jerusalem then Sarah fled back to Paris, leaving her conservative parents in complete disarray. The father is bitter and angry with his daughter living away from the family.
Sarah decided to spend her month vacation in Jerusalem after 3 years of absence. Saba (grand father in Hebrew) of Sarah was orphaned and studied to be rabbi. Rachael or Safta (grand mother), a beautiful girl, married thinking her man is going to act and behave as rabbi, with a social class and potential financial potentials. Saba was not interested in social affairs and spent his days reading at the synagogue; he also enjoyed drinking alcoholic beverages: he was an alcoholic. Safta insisted on playing the role of the wife of a fictitious rabbi in the Tunisian Jewish community; she would pray to Adonai (the name of God among the Sephardic immigrants, the God of Canaan and Phoenicia; The State of Israel of the Ashkenazi is trying to banish Adonai).
In Paris, the father of Sarah had to cloth his father differently; instead of the “red tarbush or kabouch” Saba wore forced by his son to wear a hat; the serwal was changed to a European dress. Saba learned to take the bus to the nearest Synagogue every day for the whole day. Saba was only given bus fare and something to eat but he always managed to come home drunk; the Jews entering the Synagogue had all kinds of excuses to offering reading rabbis small changes. Saba said of Paris “a country of images and idols”. Safta was completely disoriented in Paris but she practically raisded the kids while confined in the apartment. She would never beat the kids but encouraged her son to do the chastising
Saba and Safta were relegated to live in desert Beersheba with Sarah’s aunt. They were buried in a cemetery by the Olive Mountain close to Jerusalem.
The two younger brothers of Sarah are serving in the Israeli army (Tsahal) invading Lebanon in 1982 and entering the Capital Beirut and facilitating the genocides in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila.
The same as Safta ruined her life with Saba, the mother of Sarah, Camille, has ruined her life with her father. The parents stopped having sexual contacts after the birth of the last son Joseph. Camille cut her long hair and wore the scarf over her head to appease the anger of her husband. When Camille is away of her husband she feels younger; she longes to visit her daughter in Paris and tour the museums and theaters but she never got around her wishes. Camille is living awaiting her two sons to return home after the war. No mother in Israel has a normal life. It has been a succession of wars since the independence of the State of Israel; people have stopped planning for the future; they can die tomorrow. The soldiers return bitter and discouraged because they never see the use of these wars that didn’t bring peace or security.
Maud is a married neighbor of Sarah; she said “I don’t understand politics. I voted for Menahem Begin on instinct. Begin is the King of Israel”. During Chabath (Saturday) that starts around 4 p.m. on Friday, people stay home; the streets are deserted, and shops close down. Food are cooked on Friday and kept warm for a whole day on electric warmers so that no one should cook after 4 p.m.
Lea is saying to Myriam “you will leave this State to the Arabs without reacting?” Miriam retorted “who are the masons, the cleaners, the gardeners, and the servers in restaurants? If the Palestinians decided to stop working for us and adopt passive resistance then Israel would vanish in no time.” When in war, men are enlisted in the army and the crops are destroyed if Palestinians refuse to harvest.
When Safta died the custom required all the close relatives of Safta to live in her son’s home for 7 days and nights. They were the old generation of Tunisia; they were crippled; they just read and prayed; they waited to be nourished three times a day; they farted and urinated haphazardly but that what the rabbi recommended as the best remedy in order to forget mourning. Sarah fell in love with Henry, originally a Moroccan immigrant. She didn’t stay home to care for the elderly visitors and exaggerated her make up and went out all night in shorts and mini-skirts bringing the wrath of her older generation. She was considered crazy. Sarah had decided to stay in Jerusalem, quit her Jewish boyfriend waiting for her in Paris, and then marry Henri. Henry decided to go to Beirut on a reporting mission for three days; he did not return.
Note 1: The author Chochana Miller Boukhobza had hard time with the Israeli authority regarding acknowledging her Jewishness. She has American nationality and was converted by a “reformist” rabbi. The conservative rabbi at the Israeli ministry of Interior suggested that Chochana be reconverted by an orthodox rabbi in order to avoid refusal of an Israeli citizenship according to the “law of return”. She had to fight to circumvent these regulations and set uproar in Israel. The State of Israel refused to discriminate among types of Jews in order to encourage immigration to the State of Israel.
Note 2: (In spite of religions, the customs and traditions in the Arab World, especially in the Near East, are basically the same. These customs are the inheritance of millennia of people of “The Land”. The various religions changed headdresses and a little in the fashion for the sake of forcing discrimination for political reasons. The clergies of the different religions needed a tad of fashion changes to retain political dominance among their corelegionnaires. Outside, the headdresses might sort out the various sects but inside their homes the people are the same: their idioms, their habits, their food, and their interior style in furniture and comfort are the same. People before 1920 could not differentiate a Jew from a Christian or a Moslem. Even after decades of living in Israel, the Arab Jewish immigrants have conserved their Arabic language and the customs they inherited from their original Arab States. Many Arab diplomats, of States having signed “peace treaties” with Israel who could visit Jerusalem or Haifa or Yafa would declare that they felt in an Arab city. All these wars have nothing to do with religion: they are the consequences of European Ashkenazi playing the colonialists and applying colonial rules and regulations of apartheid.)
Roger H. Crook. An Introduction to Christian Ethics (5th edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006. xi + 308 p.
In this introductory work Robert Crook seeks to write a text that will enable students who are unfamiliar with the discipline to begin to “develop a method of dealing with the thorny moral issues that they face not only as students but also as people involved in the life of the broader community (vii).”
This commitment to practicality is evidenced by the layout of the book. Section I is devoted to exploring the basic definitions, concepts, and approaches to the field. In this area fundamental definitions are given and other religious approaches to ethics are explicated.
Sections II explores Crook’s approach to ethical thinking and decision-making. In this section we see Crook interact with the biblical material and theological issues related to ethics. Finally, section III is a broad exploration of several contemporary issues. Little personal conviction is stated by Crook in the final section, but rather an explication of the salient points of each issue is highlighted. What follows are some general comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the book.
To begin, Crook “recognizes as viable options a number of other” Christians systems, and seeks to present them without evaluation (vii). While Crook admits in the same paragraph that as a text on Christian ethics it must make certain assumptions, throughout the book Crook aims at prescription, not description.
In the first section Crook by and large achieves a level of detachment. This goal of demonstrating a Niebuhrian sense of humility (or pluralism as Yoder critiqued it) becomes a bit awkward when Crook turns more intensely to the biblical and theological issues surrounding ethics. Here Crook for the most part comes down off his perch of detachment and admittedly gives his own method for ethical decision making (cf vii-viii).
This shift in method is made difficult by the overall absence of the abstract theories enumerated in section I of the book. On page 54 Crook admits that at the conclusion of the methodological survey that he emphasizes the responsiblity of the individual to God in Christ, whose character is formed within the Christian community. From this short endorsement one can discern both Crook’s preference for Niebuhrian/Gustafsonian “responsibility ethics” and virtue ethics, at least in as much as it focuses on communal aspects of virtue formation (36-41, 43-45). However no indepth attempt at justifying these preferences are given, and instead Crook merely turns to an examination of the use of biblical, theological, and experiential (mind, conscience, & and the prompting of the Spirit) resources in his own framework.
While i appreciate Crook’s concern to not brainwash beginners, the unwillingness to demonstrate the inner logic he sees between ethical theory and his biblical and theological beliefs could just as easily leave the beginner wondering what exactly the point of the first section was. Crook may have given students plenty of fish, but hasn’t shown them how to fish for these interconnections themselves.
At this point it seems reasonable to see if there is a reason for this noticable gap other than simple pedagogical preference. Although this may sound harsh, this unwillingness to connect his theoretical preferences with his biblical and theological convictions is that their connection proves to be rather thin at times.
For example, Crook argues that
for Paul, as for Jesus, the starting point in thinking about human life was the sovereignty of God (87).
When one reads further the nature of this sovereign being is relativized due to our limited human vantage point. Here, where the mention of the revelatory incarnation would be so helpful, we instead find a more generic description of God as person, creator, sovereign, and judge (94-95).
This is not to say that Crook’s rendering of biblical and theological ethics carries nothing of substance, but only that his approach ends up rendering his general guidelines for decision making vague, making the practical value of all his analysis impoverished.
At this point, in only reading one book by Crook, it is hard to tell if this is simple intellectual humility or evidence of a high class intellectual elitism, similar to what Yoder criticized Niebuhr for in his classic Christ & Culture. Yoder criticized Niebuhr for cloaking an arrogance which believed that the ivy-league elite alone could understand the complexity of culture and the lack of a “right answer” within the apparent humility of admitting such difficulties. Thus, only the Yale-taught relativist could understand that there was no right answer, and all who opposed this humble relativism would be met with scathing hostility. Given Crook’s close proximity to Niebuhrian thought & Richard’s disciple Gustafson, Crook’s analysis may hide the same intent. Only further reading can resolve this issue.*
Regardless of the reason for these deficiencies, it should come as little surprise that these ambiguities lead to a 3rd section characterized largely by description, with little conviction given and even less defended by the author.
In sum, Crook’s descriptions are fair, generous, and accessible to beginners from beginning to end. This is the strength of the book. However, if one believes that Christian teaching, if it is to be Christian, must move beyond mere description and into the prescriptive realm, then Crook’s book will have little value outside of providing vital foundation pieces, as lucid and helpful as they are. Thus, this book highlights a deeper problem within the field of Christian ethics an education; the relationship between the church and modern educational models.**
*Much of the critique of section II of Crook’s book is born out of Yoder’s critique of H.R. Niebuhr in the book “Authentic Transformation.”
**This was first made apparent to me, from all places, in the blogosphere! Click here for the simple post that illuminated this point.
P.S. Comics. Melanie “Minty” Lewis. Fiction – Graphic Novel/Comics
I picked this up totally randomly last week at the comic book store. And it’s a great little book. And completely what I was in the mood for. I’m also glad I purchased it because these are the kind of books that I want (need!) to survive in comics. Totally off the beaten path, with good, but ‘affordable’ production design (i.e. no color), etc.
After doing a little research I found that Lewis’ P.S. Comics started as mini-comics (I suppose self published) and have gained enough awards and recognition to make the leap to full blown book in local comic stores – which is fantastic. Lewis’ issue #4 of the original mini-comic even won an Ignatz Award for ‘outstanding mini-comic’.
Lewis’ stories are mostly simple little tales that reveal tiny but important truths and are told via unconventional narrators – fruit, dogs, cats, and sometimes even humans. My favorite tale of hers (available to read on her website if you’re so inclined) was about salt and sugar falling in love. Their friends (pepper and coffee) of course make things a bit difficult for them, but their love prevails…at least for a little while. It’s a great little story and I smiled all the way through. Her dog and cat stories are good as well, but I personally found myself drawn more to her fruit stories – perhaps because I identified with poor apple – but that’s a whole other post.
Regardless, this is a great little book, and I encourage anyone that likes independent comics, or is looking to discover something new, to pick up P.S. Comics.
3.5 Stars
“The other Upchurch toddlers had never seen so much as a minute of television. They didn’t have tantrums that made us late for school…or occasion parent-teacher conferences because of their talent-show choices.”
Very funny insights to the “perfect Mommy syndrome” the neighborhood park benches filled with perfectly coiffed, well-heeled and model-like bodies of “Barbie does Suburbia”– Upchurch versus the former career woman of NYC now plagued with dirty cargo pants,a disheveled appearance, and a scattered lifestyle.
However, the perfect mom, Kitty Cavanaugh, who pens an article (well she ghostwrites) about the elusive “perfect mommy” meets a tragic ending to the “perfect life.” Kate happens upon the corpse and is cast into the web with the strange tie to Kitty and to a mystery man from Kate’s past. Suburbia is in chaos and the “playgrounds” of both the stepford wife-like crew and their families are full of suspicion and danger. The “sandbox” is no longer safe.
While the novel is an enjoyable and entertaining read, the plot is a bit disjointed. I did, however, sympathize with Kate’s need to investigate Kitty’s murder as it gave meaning to an otherwise mundane life where she made rather unsuccessful attempts to join the “perfect-mommy” club. The question becomes: Is there such a club and what is the price of membership?
