After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction

by Renata Adler, Michael Wolff (Preface)

What is really going on here? For decades Renata Adler has been asking and answering this question with unmatched urgency.  As a staff writer at The New Yorker . Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; the wars in Biafra, and the Middle East; the Nixon impeachment inquiry; cultural life in Cuba. She also reported on politics and culture in the United States, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times ), books,  television,  pop music, the press. She has taken risks in order to give us the news, not the "news" we have become accustomed to--celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas--but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus, when too many other writers have joined the pack. The more recent pieces are concerned with, in her words, "misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist's role in it.". Adler brilliantly unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss, the ones that explain what really is going on --from the Watergate scandal, to the "preposterous" Kenneth Starr report during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, and the story of then New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. She writes brilliantly too about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. Gore.

The Best Books of 2015 (So Far) . Two years after the reappearance in print of her novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark , Adler has returned again as a reporter, essayist, and critic --- one of the best we've had on all three fronts. ... and the truth is, though she's been near-silent for some time, she only ever got better. - Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine (July 23, 2015)

Review
"The wonderfully funny, acute Renata Adler is almost as good an essayist as a novelist ... It doesn't mean much to say that Renata Adler's journalism isn't quite as interesting as her novels --- almost nothing is as interesting as Renata Adler's novels. ... If Adler has an heir it might be someone like the recently retired TV satirist Jon Stewart, who shares both her moral wryness and love for America. Perhaps the real loss is that nobody quite this careful is paying attention." --- Daniel Swift, Spectator, UK; 
Review
" It is Adler's sort of death's-head wit that makes her such a visionary reporter -- in the Letter from Biafra, for "Suddenly a shrieking, giggling band of of eleven young men and three boys passed through the market, as though carried away by some enervating, mocking joke. These were some of the 'artillery cases' one sees all over Biafra, people claiming some local variety of shell shock and traveling always in packs." The "enervating, mocking joke" here -- if we listen for it --- is the failure of the UN to prevent or arrest a genocide, and beyond that the "sheer, bitterly comic ugliness of human suffering."  "If Adler were a man ... would she be one of the boys ---celebrated and honored as a journalist-hero in the popular mind? With the electricity of her prose, I think she would. The publication of After the Tall Timber may move her closer in, or place a seal upon her exile. Either way, she'll be proved right." --- Barnes & Noble Review. Review
"Ladies and gentlemen, Renata Adler is back! It feels momentous and just plain correct that we now have After the Tall Timber, a new collection of Adler's nonfiction, "-- Abby Aguirre, Vogue
"One of the last essays in the book is, hilariously. about Bush v. Gore. Remember that? What a time in our shared heritage. ...  I can't stop thinking about these sentences, both their meaning and their structure. Because she is so right about something we've all experienced but so rarely name. ... Last week I mentioned that I was reading the new collection of Renata Adler's essays. Now I'm going to mention it again, because the entire book is so fucking good. You have to read it. --- Haley Mlotek, The Hairpin

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Politics, Journalism, History, Criticism, Cultural Studies

515 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 2015

About the author

Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University.

Adler’s essays and articles have been collected in Toward a Radical Middle (1969) and A Year in the Dark (1970), Reckless Disregard (1986), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Renata Adler is also the author of two successful novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Both novels are composed of seemingly unconnected passages that challenge readers to find meaning. Like her nonfiction, Adler's novels examine the issues and mores of contemporary life.

In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.

Reviews

[Steve Petherbridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my slowest read of 2015 due to constant need to Google research characters and events! No denying the quality of the reportage and other prose, but, it was a a slog! Really a text book for journalism and history students, it reaffirms one's doubts about the veracity and manipulation of the citizenry by U.S. media, even the NY Times, ruling conservatism and "old money" and divisions in U.S. Society!

Interesting to me especially, from page 340 (and confirming European media of the time), because, it is demonstrating how the powerful conservative cabal "went after" and "distracted" Clinton, as they have been doing with with Obama, both intelligent, somewhat naive and over-self-confident outsiders who thought that they could work “the system”, by manipulating the statutes and governing bodies of the U.S. A democracy? Land of the free? I have my doubts.

A keystone cops chapter on the National Guard. The U.K. Territorial Army and Ireland's part-time armies are streets ahead in terms of discipline and training. Then again, our UN participating forces have tales of the U.S. Army's sad decline. It's the U.S. Marine Corps, Special Forces and the U.S.'s sheer weight of weaponry and manpower that usually forms their and our cavalry. When we desperately need a strong America, with minimal self-interest, this book, like those of other objective commentators, sews seeds of doubt. Note: this author is a proud and patriotic American, who just tells it how it is.

Renata Adler, now in her 70s, made it big when she was young and then vanished. Or "was vanished!"

What threw Adler’s career off course was not being able to keep silent, and the shunning she endured as a result shows that “even serious writing is harshly proscribed, that the literary life has its hard rules, that politics must be carefully played, that renegades – and, no doubt, especially women renegades – who go past an undrawn line are cast out”.

In her mid-20's she joined the staff of the famous New Yorker, where she spent the 1960s covering the civil-rights movement and reporting from the pivotal events of the day, including Six Day War, Vietnam and the now nearly forgotten, Biafra.

In 1968 she became the first woman film critic at the New York Times – a job so desirable that an ad for a department store read, “Some people think Renata Adler’s job is like being paid to eat bonbons.”

Her two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983) were highly acclaimed and she was photographed by Richard Avedon. Dark clouds gathered - that inability to keep silent – or to keep silent about certain people. “I never attacked anyone weak,” Adler said in a 2012 interview. “Only bullies, secure in their courts, bureaucracies, fiefdoms. Fear didn’t come into it. Maybe it should have.”

In 1980, while still writing for the New Yorker, Adler published a takedown of Pauline Kael, the magazine’s powerful film critic, in the New York Review of Books. I had to research this episode to gain a perspective and relevance. With detailed meticulousness, she charted Kael’s decline from a young freelance critic of unmatched “energy and good sense” to one of “protracted, obsessional invective” and wrote that Kael had altered criticism “astonishingly for the worse”. In 1986 came Reckless Disregard, in which she tore strips off the establishment represented by CBS and Time magazine for irresponsible and dishonest work. Lazy journalism was her bug bear i.e. journalists relying on “informed sources” and not uprooting the truth and the story themselves.

In 1999. In Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, she chronicles the sad decline of the magazine. It famously began: ‘As I write this, The New Yorker is dead.’ The New York Times published several negative articles about this “irritable little book” and questioned Adler’s ethics, but, the truth is the truth and often hurts.

With her principle professional relationships with peers and the so called 4th Estate unsurprisingly soured, Adler retreated to Newtown, Connecticut. Now, in 2014, it is "as though some statute of limitations on her offences has run out".

In 2013 the NYRB reissued Speedboat and Pitch Dark, and it has now published After the Tall Timber. Interviews, appearances and retrospectives of her works supposedly abound. Some pieces here may truthfully noy stand the test of time, but, are worth reading whilst remembering the context of that time.

"A laudatory piece by Meghan O’Rourke appeared in the New Yorker titled “Welcome Back, Renata Adler”.

Time heals I guess. Wounds heal. A new generation is reading her fiction, which is compressed, inspired, oblique and sharp. This compendium of work is a grouping of reflections of their time – the fragmentation of certainties, "the dismantling of sense that was the 1960s and ’70s".

After the Tall Timber contains Adler’s journalism from the mid- 1960s to 2003. There are pieces drawn from Toward a Radical Middle (her early New Yorker work), A Year in the Dark (film reviews) and Canaries in the Mineshaft (writings on misrepresentation, coercion and abuse of public processes, and the journalist’s part in it). They definitely lent me a new perspective on how America politically functions and certainly has caused me to review the Presidency of Nixon and more so, that of Clinton. One’s admiration, if it existed before reading this tough read, for America suffers somewhat.

These analytical pieces address some of the major American events of recent decades (when I was a teenager and blinded by what I read in the news media or heard on the radio and TV) such as Watergate, the abysmal Starr report on Bill Clinton, the dubious Supreme Court ruling in Bush v Gore, and the decline of serious journalism in favour of "lazy journalism", especially in the supposedly venerable New York Times, which was both surprising and disappointing to me.

Quotation from the Irish Times review; “One of the pleasures of reading Adler is that she is far less predictable than most journalists. She championed centrism and never embraced the orthodoxy of the Left (in the early 1960s she was a “liberal Republican”). She has written sympathetically of G Gordon Liddy and accused Watergate judge John Sirica of incompetence, corruption, and “clear ties to organized crime”.
She has written unflatteringly of Bob Woodward, who, with Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate story: it was Woodward who produced “the nominal encounter” between the anonymous source and the young reporter, upon which “a religion was born, which has grown to affect not just journalism but the entire culture”. (And by “affect”, Adler doesn’t mean improve.)
In 1969, she described American radicalism as one of “rhetoric, theatre, mannerism, psychodrama”, which viewed “every human problem at a single level of atrocity”.
And so on. But Adler appears to take no obvious satisfaction in flaying her subjects. It is simply what you do, you get the story straight. She marshals the evidence, and her attention to detail is obsessive.
Apart from an earnest indignation, this isn’t emotional writing. “I particularly detested, and detest, the ‘new journalism’,” she writes. And indeed, her work is largely free of personality. The personal is saved for the fiction.
The return to print of Adler’s work is great news. Hers has been one of the odder instances of the writing life, and the determination with which she seemed to make inevitable her banishment from New York literary circles is rather fascinating.
Wolff writes of her prose that it is some of the most brutal ever directed at journalism: “It exists in service to itself, as its own standard, as its own force, and not in support of political or commercial positions.” One wonders if there was also something else at work, conscious or not, in Adler’s trajectory.
In her Kael piece, which is also about the dangers of writing criticism under constant deadlines, Adler says: “A voice that may have seemed, sometimes, true and iconoclastic when it was outside can become, with institutional support, vain, overbearing, foolish, and hysterical.” What one gets in place of quiet authority is “the somewhat violent spectacle of a minor celebrity in frenzy”.
Renata Adler recused herself, rather dramatically, from institutional support, and thus perhaps from a similar fate.”

A very interesting and a historical read, especially to those of us who grew up in the 1970’s, or 1960’s, but, were perhaps, a bit young to fully understand what was happening. Renata Adler’s bravery and professionalism as a journalist shines through - she just told it how it how she saw it, trading on the toes of peers and the establishment in the process! Up there with Robert Fisk, John Pilger and other real reporters. Worth the slog!

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a book, this might have been more enjoyable with three or four fewer pieces in it, especially since nearly all of them are quite long and don't necessarily stand the test of time. One piece is a far-too-detailed detailed account of G. Gordon Liddy's 1980 book tour; it trudges into the 20,000-word range. The writing is sturdy but there's so much of it that a reader often gets lost in it and misses the good stuff. (If there's good stuff.)

I'm glad I read this, though. A review of "After the Tall Timber" in The Atlantic Monthly (link below) eloquently sums up the value in revisiting Renata Adler's nonfiction (the review makes a better case than Michael Wolff makes in the introduction, I think). For too long all I knew about Renata Adler came from little swipes at her in the old Spy magazine or outright vilification in the NYT and elsewhere whenever she seemed to piss off the wrong people.

Her early reportage is a strong example of the Mr. Shawn-era New Yorker. Today we'd probably call those pieces a "notebook dump," in which it seems the writer is just shoveling everything under the sun into a strict narrative order of observed details and quotes but without any point of view or indication of where the piece is headed or, more importantly, what the news is here.

Her piece for The New Yorker on Sunset Strip hippies in Los Angeles (which ran in February 1967 at a little more than 7,000 words) stands in sharp contrast to Joan Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" piece from San Francisco's Haight Ashbury scene (which ran in September 1967 in the Saturday Evening Post at a somewhat shorter length -- 4,000 words? -- but in a more segmented, staccato style that readers liked a whole lot more); Adler deplores, in that moment and later, this hyper-stylized work of the so-called "New Journalists" blazing around her. Adler's work was old-school reportage and analysis. Her later work comes slightly unhinged, I suppose, but it's not exactly in the wrong and never as sloppy or mean as her critics claimed it to be.

Although one of the marquee pieces here (and most sensational at the time) is Adler's 1980 takedown of The New Yorker's widely-revered movie critic, Pauline Kael, I found myself more taken with Adler's reflection of her own (very short) tenure as the chief movie critic for The New York Times in 1968, when she was just 29 years old. This passage in particular resonated with me; in fact, it's a chillingly spot-on description of how I feel in 2015, writing eleventy-seven pieces of TV criticism at once:

"Being film critic for The New York Times for a year (fourteen months, really) was for me a particular kind of adventure -- with time, with tones of voice, with movies, with editing, with the peculiar experience it always is to write in one's own name something that is never exactly what one would have wanted to say." (Emphasis mine.) THIS. Yes. Hitting "send" on those almost-but-not-quite attempts to eloquently get at the thing you were trying to get at, and never feeling like you quite did.

Here's the link to "Renata Adler: Troll or Treasure?" by James Parker, Atlantic Monthly, May 2015: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

[Andrew]

Like all collections of essays, or short stories, or interviews, or whatever, After the Tall Timber is a thoroughly uneven compilation, spanning a pretty damn long period of time, from the glittering golden years of New York letters to the dark depths of the Bush era. At times she was brilliant -- and I especially enjoyed her butting heads with fellow grande dame Pauline Kael, a near TMZ-level piece of virtuoso bitchiness, as well as her piece on the incredible stupidity of the National Guard as an entity -- and at times she was doing some pretty shitty bloviating, with an annoying lack of explicit stance (especially in the later essays where the subjects of her writing were recent enough to cross paths with my own stances). Also, she really really really hates the journalistic establishment by the end (which to a certain extent is fair, the way that current Democratic Party apparatchiks lionize the fourth estate is fucking dumb), and the tone in places reminds me of an angry letter to the editor in a small-town paper. She might not match the heights she does in her fiction, but on the whole, I was satisfied.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the Tall Timber

This is a collection of Adler's best non-fiction from her decades at The New Yorker and as a reporter. She is an exceptionally talented writer whose work reads like a biography. She uses an abundance of well placed quotations which is a staple of veteran biographers. I found her older essays in this collection, those from the 1960s and 1970s, to be the most interesting, in part because these articles read like good history. The latter essays from the late 1980's and into the 2000's didn't interest me so much because as an adult I consume a lot of current events and lived through that period, so the content was not so revealing.

Here are the three essays that I loved: The March for Non-Violence for Selma, G. Gordon Liddy in America, and Letter from Biafra. I will focus on the fist one of these articles here because it is my favorite .

The March for Non-Violence for Selma.

This is a remarkable essay and one of Adler’s first articles for the New Yorker and she tells the story masterfully at a grass roots level. The background is that the first of three Selma marches took place on “Bloody Sunday” March 7th, 1965 and was a protest of both the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson in nearby Marion in the prior weeks and the effort to gain African American voting rights. It would become the most violent and bloody of the three marches. This first march was led by John Lewis and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Of course Lewis would end up fighting for his life with a fractured skull after being attacked by local police at the Pettis bridge. Dozens of other marchers would end up in the hospital. Most of us are familiar of this seminal event and the brutality and violence and tear gas from the blue helmeted thugs that quickly ensued. Two days later Martin Luther King led a second protest march that turned around at the bridge at the request of President Johnson so as to not inflame the illegal and racist order from Wallace that a march all the way to Montgomery was not permitted. That night James Reeb a white pastor from Boston participants in the protests was beaten to death by segregationists in Selma. Reeb would die several days later in the hospital and a memorial service was held with Dr. King in attendance. The national outrage over the murders had grown. By the third march, a judge had ruled that the protestors would be allowed to march to Montgomery but it limited to only 300 marchers along a narrow highway portion thousands of others would be allowed on the other parts of the route. This is where Adler’s article begins.

The third march began on March 21st at the Brown Chapel church in Selma. Adler accompanied upwards of 25,000 marchers. In the moment, everyone knew that this was a seminal historical event. The peaceful protest was a five day walk in mixed weather. There were sunburns and then later came the cold and rain. Most of the protestors had to camp in wet fields or church parking lots at each day’s end where there were no campfires to stay warm. The food was large comprised of watery eggs for breakfast and spaghetti for dinner. This was a mess operation on the scale of a military invasion. Adler points out the disorganized nature of the march and the logistics but I think this lends authenticity to her story. The bulk of the participants there were every day people including oppressed African Americans living in Wallace’s Alabama and elsewhere in the South. She spoke with a blind greenhouse worker from Atlanta and a one-legged settlement house worker from Saginaw, Michigan. Many were also young college kids from around the country.

There were many moments of tension created by the agitators and segregationists along the roadsides with their racist signs, Confederate flags and blaring their tropes and taunts from loudspeakers which the marshals largely ignored. As a reader you are acutely sensitized to the potential for violence. When a young white bystander told the marchers that they were agitators and should go home because “the Negroes around here are happy”, a black marshal turned and said in response, “Well I’m not happy”, and shut down that line of reasoning. One white asked frustratedly and incredulously to the protesters, “What do you want?” with “freedom” being the immediate retort. Whenever the marching would stop many worried that someone at the front of the line had been assaulted or murdered as the events of Bloody Sunday were constantly on everyone’s mind. They were also worried about snipers and even snakes as they moved through the swampland of Lowndes County on the way to the capital.

By the fifth day the three hundred permitted marchers and the many other thousands in support finally arrived safely at the capital steps in Montgomery. This would become the day of speeches and with a lot of jeering and taunting towards George Wallace’s office at the capitol. In the eyes of the protestors Wallace’s public demagoguery had been beaten down by the events of the last several days. Of course Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and Ralph Abernathy were there for most of the march and other celebrities were brought in on the final day including Sammy Davis Jr. and Joan Baez. But Adler’s focus was not overly centered on the historical figures. When Ralph Abernathy talks about his friend Martin Luther King as the second coming of Christ, Renata quotes one of the college students as saying “This personality cult is getting out of hand.” Adler even manages to capture the racism held by the white protestors themselves, some of whom, think the march should be more neutral and less about African Americans explicitly and more about equal voting rights.

I have always liked any writing (fiction and non-fiction) that is on the periphery of historical events. It often seems more genuine to me than being inside “the room” so to speak. Rather than a dialogue in the inner circle say between Martin Luther King and Andrew Young what might a person making the eggs for 1,000 marchers think about the whole affair. Adler is there in midst of the humanity and many such insightful situations make her writing come alive.

4.5 stars. In this collection her prose and insights are often sheer perfection. I didn’t give the book 5 stars because much of the subject material is not so timely any more. But anyone wanting to write - say a college essay - would be well served so witness a master at work. FWIW, I also loved Adler’s novel Speedboat (1976) and can highly recommend.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let’s be honest: We’re all here for “House Critic,” aren’t we? I will admit that I skipped around some; some essays certainly held my interest more than others. It is, nonetheless, an impressive body of work; Adler’s career spans important decades in modern American life, and she views it all with keen-eyed suspicion.

[v]

she writes a damn good sentence. also: time is a flat circle, many ended up feeling relevant or at least interesting to the Discourses Of The Day, still.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like a challenge read. I was challenged. Writing about the Supreme Court, special prosecutors, journalist attempts to get to the “truth”. It’s not a walk in the park but it is very informative.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renata Adler first spent years working at the New Yorker and the New York Times, and subsequently years relentlessly attacking her former employers in print for bad journalism, bad ethics, and bad writing. And it's hard, reading her "takedowns" of these publications (today's clickbait headlines might read something like "Renata Adler DESTROYS the New York Times in 50 pages"), to disagree with many of her conclusions. Adler' early journalistic pieces are tour-de-forces of astonishing reportage; she goes to the Sunset Strip to write about the lost children of the late '60s, she goes to Biafra to write about its doomed attempt to secure independence from Nigeria, she follows G. Gordon Liddy around America on a book tour (a piece many Goodreads denizens single out for its over-the-top, dry reporting, but who am I to deny the pleasures of excess in any of its forms?). She reports on the march from Selma, a melodramatic radical leftist convention in the late '60s (the absurdities of which will resonate with anyone my age who pays attention to radical discourse), and even the state of Cuban cinema. In her later years, her work takes a very different turn; this book includes her infamous takedown of Pauline Kael in which Adler argues that a recently published Kael collection is "utterly worthless," Adler's close reading of the Starr report, her analysis of the Watergate scandal (which hypothesizes that Nixon was being bribed to keep American troops in Vietnam), and a scathing critique of the New York Times for its approach to the Wen Ho Lee and Jayson Blair scandals. Occasionally, I got the sense that Adler was losing her train of thought (especially in her confusing and messy defense of centrism in "Towards a Radical Middle."), and at times she bogged her essays down with relentless parades of facts that may or may not have relevance to the subject at hand; this trend was much more noticeable in her later work.

Reading her work in an election cycle - especially this one - was especially illuminating, given that one of her biggest points of contention with journalists was that too often they colluded with instead of criticizing politicians and government employees.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure where this falls in the world of criticism (I haven't read much literature concerning the critiquing of critics aside from this), but this was a very eye-opening read for me personally. I love her writing, both its clarity and its fearlessness. Several times while reading this, I thought about skipping an essay because it was about something that didn't interest me (The Bork court, for one), but I was proven wrong every time. More than anything, this collection taught me (in very specific terms) how to be critical of the news I read, and how entities like the New York Times use retractions and press statements to shape how they are perceived.

Now I really want to read a book criticizing Renata Adler. I don't think she would mind, in fact she would probably welcome it.

[Derrick Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's easy to see why Renata Adler doesn't sit well with her fellow journalists: she simply has no qualms about calling b.s. on them, even in pieces, such as her Letter From Selma, that are more straightforward (though powerful and well-written) journalism.

But for those of us who think of journalism as something that requires as much critical thought as everything else we read, there's a lot of thought-provoking writing here. It is easy for a reader to consider the news as authoritative, because that's how it's portrayed, but Adler's essays remind you to keep your wits about you and find out the facts from diverse sources.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The bravura performances arrive at the final third of the book, when Adler applies her prosecutorial acumen to the folly that was Nixon/Watergate, the Clinton impeachment debacle and Bush v. Gore. Still, getting past the hatchet job on Pauline Kael was no romp through the heather; Adler is just wholly and astonishingly wrong here, so much that every declarative sentence is either a byproduct of a misbegotten opinion or simple intellectual tinnitus. That I could get past that calumny without flinging the anthology aside is testament to how worthy the late-period work really is.

[Keight · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the downsides of my technique of requesting lots of popular books from the library and then reading them as I progress through long hold lists is that I sometimes get books when I’m not truly prepared to delve into them. Most likely I would have picked something lighter after just reading a long non-fiction book than another long non-fiction book. But there was no dallying when my turn came… Read more on the booklog

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of well-written essays from Ms Adler's long career with The New Yorker. Spanning a long period in contemporary American life, from the early 60s to just past the turn of the millennium, these works have appeared in other collections of her work, and are excerpted from those earlier collections. She is a fine writer, but the varied subject matter was not always to my taste. Nonetheless, well worth a peek between the covers.

[Richard Epstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the rest of us were absorbing events, Adler was trying to understand, then record them in clear, perspicacious prose. She succeeded. You will never think about the people of Watergate the same way again. Oh, and you will never read the New York Times the same way either.*


*Or Pauline Kael, but that seems less important.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really love Adler's fiction and here she's often correct in her analysis and critique but the parsing of words is...(and I hope I chose correctly Renata)...tedious.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a tough read. I would definitely recommend everyone read it, but maybe don't try to do it all in one day.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent analyses and insights

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent collection of Adler’s nonfiction - although it curiously doesn’t contain any of her movie reviews - that covers the bases. Major pieces include a long read about G Gordon Liddy (before he became a Fox News talking head), a look at the Selma march in 1965, a devastating piece on Pauline Kael and her fighting back at a NYT series of hit pieces.

Where Adler is in her element is when she writes about law - her pieces on the Supreme Court, Bush v Gore and the real crimes of the Nixon administration are worth the price of entry. Adler went to law school and when she delves into these murky waters, she’s able to write about them in a clear, concise way.

There is a little filler here: a few pieces of reportage from Cuba don’t add much, and it republishes the introductions from a couple of her books. Curiously, as noted above, it includes the intro to her collection of movie criticism but doesn’t include any of her reviews. Maybe she doesn’t want people comparing them to Kael, especially after she takes that critic down a peg or two…

Overall people who dig the reportage in magazines like Harpers, the New Yorker or the like will find a few good long reads here. People coming from Adler’s fiction might be a little surprised - there her writing is more fluid and disjointed, here it’s more ornate and concrete. But I did enjoy this collection, and I think it shows her as one of the best essayists of her generation.

[Spiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a contrarian, and as a writer, Renata Adler kicks Christopher Hitchens' ass. The most relevant articles here, and I probably wouldn't have said this two years ago, are those examining the Watergate cover-ups, the Clinton impeachment, the Supreme Court's usurpation of power in their decision on Bush vs. Gore, and the New York Times' culpability during the Jayson Blair scandal.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember enjoying Adler's fiction, but this collection of nonfiction was a bit dull for me. I don't place any blame on the author, rather I'm a philistine that only perked up for the sections about movie reviewing and Monica Lewinsky and felt like snoozing through all the Watergate talk and criticisms of the New York Times. Anyway, just not my thing.

[Andrew Stewart · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t read every essay, it was pretty unremarkable fare aside from the notorious Kael takedown. Opinions about as bold as you’d expect from a “radical centrist”. She could write, and they may have been interesting at publication, but I didn’t see much reason for anyone to read this today.

[Iza Cupial · Rating 4 out of 5]

dziennikarstwo starej, pięknej, amerykańskiej daty <3

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

to my surprise, by reading this i learned about writing with clarity, especially from the critiques of pauline kael and the new york times. do not want renata adler scrutinizing anything i've done.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give it 4 stars to remind me of the essay I really liked, "But Ohio...", on the national guard. The rest, meh.

[Carole Hund · Rating 2 out of 5]

too much old information, too involved.

[ren · Rating 5 out of 5]

favorites:
- Letter from Biafra
- A Year in the Dark, Introduction
- On Violence, Film Always Argues Yes ★
- House Critic ★
- Canaries in the Mineshaft, Introduction
- Decoding the Starr Report ★
- A Court of No Appeal
- Irreparable Harm ★

[Annie]

I had to return it to the lib but it's definitely a pleasure. "Letter From Biafra" is pretty powerful.