The Internet and the Pope!

In the latest London Review of Books, Thomas Jones examines Andrew Keen’s jeremiad against Myspace, blogging, Wikipedia, and the like, The Cult of the Amateur, ultimately taking the book to task for making a mountain out of a virtual molehill:

Keen is right that most of this stuff is a load of crap, but he seems to have been taken in by the hype that he’s so repelled by. Yes, the web is full of rubbish uploaded by anyone and everyone. But 99.999 per cent of it is completely ignored by everyone else.”

Intrepid (and slightly irascible) Open Letters freelancer Greg Waldmann has already taken his own crack at Keen’s book; read his full-throated fulminations in our September 2007 issue.

Elsewhere, in the January 25 issue of the TLS, Peter Cornwell examines Jesus of Nazareth, the latest book written by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, and he finds much to praise - and things to give pause. For instance, the Pontiff’s scholarly tone sometimes takes him aback:

“When he writes in this mode, as a theologian for theologians, some of his lay Christian readers may get rather lost. But they should be encouraged to cling on. There is much here, as in Ratzinger’s earlier work, to feed heart as well as mind, prayer as well as preaching.”

Readers interested in a complementary - and very much more detailed - take are invited to click over to our July 2007 issue and see what our Peruvian wunderkind Ignazio De Vega thought of the Pope’s book.

In Memory of Heath Ledger

Open Letters is surprised and saddened at the death of young actor Heath Ledger, who was found dead in his Manhattan apartment two days ago. For a man still in his twenties, he’d already displayed formidable talents - for comedy in such historical confections as “A Knight’s Tale” and “Casanova,” for wry subversion in “Candy” and “Lords of Dogtown,” and for crafting a completely three-dimensional character out of sparse material, as he famously did in “Brokeback Mountain,” the role for which he will be best remembered. His death at 28, with his greatest work still ahead of him, impoverishes an industry that needs all the thoughtful, interesting leading men it can get.

Ledger was a regular visitor to Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby Street in Manhattan, where he sometimes came with friends and sometimes with his young daughter.  He was a quiet, friendly presence and surprisingly self-effacing, content like any book-lover to vanish into the stacks and do his browsing.  His death seems even more of a waste to know that he was probably in the middle of a book when it occurred.  He will be missed.

Alan Weisman and Annie Dillard

In the latest issue of Esquire, Tony Junod makes a disturbing discovery during a trip to his local Whole Foods market: copies of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us: “It’s the only non-cookbook in the bunch, and it seems, at first, like a prank, as if some Earth Firsters tried to see if they could spoil the Whole Foods party with some subversive product placement. But no. There’s nothing at a Whole Foods that’s not supposed to be there. And that’s when the realization hits: The World Without Us is not supposed to be terrifying at all. It’s supposed to be comforting.”
 
Find out more about the book - and our own Steve Donoghue’s thoughts on it - in his review, located in our July issue!
 
Likewise in the January 4 issue of the TLS, Kiare Ladner reviews Annie Dillard’s latest novel, The Maytrees, to generally rapturous effect: “Her writing often as a lyrical beauty but it is also uncompromising … her style is accessible and the writing is compelling … [her book] brilliantly captures the Cape Cod light.”
 
In that same July issue of Open Letters, our own John Cotter reviews The Maytrees and arrives at, to put it mildly, some very different verdicts. Go to the July issue and watch John take Dillard’s book out behind the woodshed!

Open Letters Echoes in the Mainstream!

In the 3 January 2008 issue of the London Review of Books, Dave Haslam explores the music and legacy of Joy Division, including the soundtrack to Anton Corbijn’s movie Control. “The allure of their bleak vision,” Haslam writes, accounts for the band’s modern-day popularity. To learn where freelancer Peter Law stands on the subject, check out his Joy Division essay in our current issue.

Also of note, in the 21 & 28 December 2007 issue of the TLS, reviewer William P. Kelly tackles Wayne Franklin’s weighty James Fenimore Cooper biography , James Fenimore Cooper: the Early Years and sings its praises, saying it will “satisfy scholarly audiences and serve as the definitive account of Cooper’s life for the foreseeable future.” Our own Steve Donoghue reviewed Franklin’s book back in August - give his piece a look and see if he concurs!

In Memory of George MacDonald Fraser

Open Letters mourns the loss of George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the great, sly series of Victorian historical novels starring that reprobate of Falstaffian proportions, Harry Flashman. Fraser wrote other books; particularly good were his novel Pyrates, a satirical tour-de-force, and Quartered Safe Out Here, a memoir of World War II. But it is for Flashman - whoring, drinking, lying, stealing, wenching, cuckolding, gambling, gorging, belching, battle-fleeing coward and raconteur Flashman - that Fraser will be chiefly remembered. The shameful exploits of this anti-paragon (picture the exact opposite of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and you’ll just about have it) brought guilty pleasure - and plenty of laughter - to millions, and they’ll continue to do so even now that their maker has passed from us. The world of letters will forever be in the debt of George MacDonald Fraser for loosing this lecherous scoundrel on the literary pantheon.