Think of the Readable Books That Could Have Filled That Space
By Granting that it’s somewhat better than the first one, can someone explain to me how Lee Siegel’s sure to be widely unread pensees about how it’s worse than the gulag when people make fun of you on the internets just because you create sockpuppets to call yourself a genius, call people fascists for disagreeing with your intermittently lucid Abe Simpson rants, and accuse people of pedophilia with no evidence can justify two reviews in the New York Times? At least when Joe Lelyveld’s memoirs — sorry, I’ve nodded off just thinking about it — inexplicably got the two review backscratch he had been with the paper for decades. Now being an occasional contributor to the book review is enough to get you two reviews of a book nobody cares about?