PressEthic

In all of the heft of Sunday’s issue of The New York Times, the separate Book Review section truly is separate. Though the paper is primarily a broadsheet, the Book Review is tabloid sized. However, it’s published on regular newspaper stock with the same dulled colors in the artwork that you’d find on the front cover of the A section.

Out of all four issues of the Book Review published this month, not one article talks about hurricanes. There are two essays about fictionalized terrorism in the September 11th issue and a review of Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda by Jean-Charles Brisard and Damien Martinez the following week, but otherwise, no talk about the war in Iraq.

Nevertheless, the Book Review is not short on news. Many of the books that are getting published reflect current events and the reviews show us the continuity between the past and the present, adding a dimension of context. This week, there was a half-page review of The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898-1911) by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano. Much of the space for the review is dominated by two large scenes from early-20th century New York. The review ends:

Not that Pulitzer’s paper was especially dutiful, or even responsible. The man who endowed the most prestigious prize in journalism also gave us headlines like ‘Scientists Know Positively That There Are Thirsty People On Mars.’ Indeed, almost all the appetite-whetting epithets that modern-day media critics like to fling around – warmongering, pandering, sensationalistic – would stick to The World, and twice on Sundays.

Sometimes (as in the case of this week’s review of two books about James Agee by Michael Sragow), the books that are being reviewed are barely mentioned, but there is an extensive discussion of the history and the issues involved with what you would read were you to purchase the books.

The Book Review is sobering versus the Style section, refreshing versus the Week in Review. Take that Michael Sragow article, which refers to Agee’s style as “altogether unlike anything in the D.H. Lawrentian clotted-cream baroque of ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ – a passionate chattiness, sly humor and demotic register forever wary of what he called ‘rigor artis,’ that has characterized the best movie criticism ever since.”

This section provides the writers with a chance to simply talk eloquently about a wide range of topics, catering to the equally wide range of topics that interest the readers. That a piece of the newspaper exists for this purpose is a wonderful thing.