SELECT WRITING
Book Reviews

Two recurring themes get special emphasis. One is that the rise of Israel transformed Jews physically and psychologically. Israeli soldiers, in particular, were strong, tanned, and tough — much unlike the stereotypes Cohen describes having become associated with the Jews of the European ghettos. That meant Israeli Jews could and would defend themselves. But it also brought power that could be abused. “After Lebanon,’’ notes Cohen, “there was no more pretending that Israel, because of its faith and its history, was immune, different, better. Like every other nation, it’s capable of both the best and the worst.’’

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“It’s been my life work,“ Seeger tells Wilkinson, “to get participation, whether i’'s a union song, or a peace song, civil rights, or a women’s movement, or gay liberation. When you sing, you feel a kind of strength; you think, ‘I'm not alone, there’s a whole batch of us who feel this way.’ I'm just one person, but it’s almost my religion now to persuade people that even if it’s only you and three others, do something. You and one other, do something.”

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McGinniss's decision to spend last year's August racing season at the famous track in Saratoga, N.Y., was that of a 60-year-old man returning to an old flame. The sport itself, meanwhile, had changed a great deal in the intervening three decades, and was now in danger of sputtering out. As McGinniss puts it: “By 2003, horse racing was no longer a vibrant part of America's sporting scene, but rather a faded relic of a bygone age. Far more people would go to a movie about a horse that raced more than fifty years ago than would watch a real horse race.”

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Brooks warns that “if at times the book seems exaggerated, caricatured, impious, or sarcastic, my only excuse is that one of the distinctive traits of Americans is that we have often tried to tell the important truths about ourselves through humor, whether in the tall tales of Mark Twain, or the wisecracks of Will Rogers, Mr. Dooley, H. L. Mencken, or Garry Trudeau.”

Well, duh. But it's impossible to imagine any of these fellows — Twain or Mencken, especially — issuing such a caveat. Neither, for that matter, would the Brooks of Bobos, and one wonders what sort of booboisie he imagines himself to be writing for this time out.

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Waugh’s strength in travel writing was in the comic set pieces that resulted from the clash of his personality — conservative, Roman Catholic, aggressively English, snobbish, acerbic — with unfamiliar people and cultures. In Labels, for instance, he decides to put ashore in Naples one Sunday morning to view the cathedral.

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“‘What were you thinking?’ asked Graydon, too staggered by my ineptitude to work himself up into a proper rage. ‘You can’t ask Hollywood celebrities whether they’re Jewish or gay. Just assume they’re both Jewish and gay, okay?’”

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