Bad reviews
So, I have a twisted fascination with reading scortching reviews, particularly of "bad movies," which I've yet to explore fully. I have often wondered exactly why a generally positive person such as myself would delight so in reviews of bad movies/art/books, and I haven't found an adaquate explanation, but I think it has something to do with the passion and zest I can sense in the author. Yes, people can get passionate about good movies/books/art, but the passion they get for bad ones is just much deeper and more interesting to me!Today I read a gloriously scathing review of a book called "Our Town," about the "hidden history of white america," by Cynthia Carr...I'll copy two of my favorite paragraphs below and you can enjoy the rest at your leisure by going to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301420.html
"In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life. Their obvious if unstated purpose is to show how the (white) author has triumphed over his or her sordid ancestral inheritance to become a person of impeccable credentials on matters racial. Though all due modesty and claims of imperfection are expressed, the reader is expected to stand and cheer as, at book's end, the author's heroic achievement is revealed in full.
...it purports to tell what its subtitle calls 'the Hidden History of White America' by exploring how its author's grandparents may or may not have been complicit in, or at least friendly witnesses to, a horrific lynching in August 1930 in the small Indiana city of Marion. The unfortunate truth is that evidence of Carr's forebears' involvement in the atrocity is slender and shadowy at best, the raw material for a magazine article at most. In order to stretch it into what frequently seems the longest book ever written, Carr is forced to look elsewhere, especially to the Ku Klux Klan, the sordid past and present of which she examines endlessly without managing to add an iota to what we already know about it." -Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post | posted by Cheryl, 3/29/2006 03:11:00 PM
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