NYT RUSHES OUT REVIEW REDO:
The New York Times, which last Sunday published a scathing front-page review of Bill Clinton's "My Life," has alerted subscribers that another, much kinder and gentler review is coming July 4 in The New York Times Book Review.
Entitled "Confessions of a Policy Wonk" and written by the novelist Larry McMurtry, the prominently placed review calls the book "the richest American presidential autobiography," and says that the former president is a better writer than Reagan, Ford, Nixon or Lyndon Johnson.
Ole Larry didn't mean writer, he meant novelist.
Unlike Michiko Kakutani, the author of the June 20 review, who called Clinton's book "eye-crossingly dull," McMurtry evokes authors from Dreiser to Fitzgerald to Balzac — if not in comparison to Clinton, at least in reference to him.
Baudelaire, Larry Flynt, and Baron Munchausen would be good too.
It is not unusual for the Times to publish two reviews of the same book, or for one review to be positive and the other negative.
What is unusual, however, is for the paper to make a critique available 10 days before it will appear in the paper.
Wouldn't want to rain on Bubba's parade, would they?
