T A B L E_.T A L K

Do you listen to talk radio? Talk about what shows you follow and why in the Media area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Hamburger Hades
By Jon Carroll
Robin Cook's "Toxin" is a tale told by a hack, full of E. Coli, signifying that the beef industry is the tool of Satan. Yum!
(06/16/98)

Content's star shortage
By Harry Jaffe
Media watchdog Steve Brill tried -- and failed -- to get big-name media talent on his masthead
(06/12/98)

Source for Kathleen Willey story sues Newsweek's Michael Isikoff
By Joe Conason
Julie Steele claims reporter violated explicit agreement that their conversations were off the record
(06/12/98)

The truism show
By James Poniewozik
The op-ed-ization of Jim Carrey's new flick turns its anti-TV take into a rerun
(06/10/98)

Rolling Stone gathers no Marx
By David Weir
Rolling Stone is 30! Jann may have forgotten -- but a former contributor remembers the mag's semi-subversive mission
(06/09/98)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

L.A.'s
_________BATTLE of the BOOKS

IS THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW THE SECOND COMING OF THE NEW YORK REVIEW -- OR AN ELITIST SECTION THAT DOESN'T SERVE ITS READERS?

BY DWIGHT GARNER | It's been a tough spring for America's book review editors. In this month's Harper's magazine, Francine Prose spanks them for paying too little attention to female writers (and reviewers). In a recent issue of the monthly Washingtonian, a writer named Paul Starobin stuck a sharp pin into the Washington Post's Sunday book section, edited by Nina King, labeling it not only "bland" and "mushy" but "amateurish." Worse, as summer approaches -- always a slow time in the book industry -- advertising pages are plummeting, leaving most of this country's weekly book sections limping along at an anemic 12 or 16 pages.

No book review editor, however, has taken a more direct hit -- or a more public one -- in recent weeks than Steve Wasserman, the brash new editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The occasion: the awards ceremony that closed the paper's annual Festival of Books, a sprawling two-day event that attracted more than 100,000 people last month. It was late in the evening, and the ceremony was drawing to its end, when novelist Ray Bradbury took the stage to accept a lifetime achievement award. Bradbury thanked the judges and issued a few genial remarks. Then he took a deep breath and blurted out the bad news: He thinks the L.A. Times Book Review, in so many words, sucks.

"Someone had to speak up about it," Bradbury later told the weekly Los Angeles New Times. "I didn't want to, but I had no choice, really." Bradbury claimed he was talking more about the section's small size than its content. "I told them, 'Your book section is flimsy.'" But he also added: "Plus it needs more L.A.-centric insight, books and authors. I haven't been asked to review a book for 15 years, and I'm right here, right under their noses!"

Wasserman has since made peace with Bradbury -- among other things, he recently gave the elderly science fiction writer a short assignment. But Bradbury's remarks became overnight the talk of the book industry on both coasts. This is partly because the 45-year-old Wasserman, formerly the editorial director of Times Books (a division of Random House), has a knack for alienating people. Those who know him tend to fall into two camps -- those who think he's unimpeachably talented and high-minded and wish him the best, and those who think he's among the most arrogant blowhards currently striding the planet and can't wait to see him fail. Few fall in between.

Part of that latter response, it should be said, might be ascribed to simple envy. Few deny that what Wasserman is up to at the L.A. Times Book Review is the most interesting -- some would say puzzling -- experiment, in terms of book coverage, currently under way at any major American newspaper. It's an experiment that raises some fascinating questions: What should a Sunday review section be? Who is it written for? And what services should it provide its readers?

Since Wasserman arrived at the Times Book Review early last year, after the ouster of editor Sonja Bolle, he's torn the section apart, remaking it in his own somewhat imperious image. Gone are most of the section's shorter reviews; gone is whatever West Coast focus it had; gone is nearly all of the coverage given to "commercial" fiction, mysteries, kid's books, first novels and science fiction. In their place is a section that reads like a scrawny relative of London's Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books. A typical issue has a slightly ponderous theme ("Doing Philosophy," "Tribes," "Making History") and is given over largely to academic writers (John Lukacs, Susan Sontag, Bernard Knox) who feast on largely academic topics (the history of medicine, Martin Heidegger's philosophy, the demise of classical education). Few pieces weigh in at under 1,500 words. Few reviews, besides those of staff critic Richard Eder, are of new fiction. The cover lines on one recent issue included: "Basil Davidson on the Photography of Seydou Keita"; "David Raines Wallace on the Guayaki Indians"; "Donald Johnson on Ice Age Art." Frappucino, anyone?

Wasserman, who last year described the New York Times Book Review as "very thin gruel indeed," says he's merely giving his readers what they want. "Despite the fetish for sun and surf in Los Angeles," he says, "this is actually the country's No. 1 book market. Our readership is full of adults who want to be spoken to as adults. Most review sections give them only baby talk."