A Dead Review?

A RELIC OF LITERATURE PAST

The New York Times came out Sunday, April 20, with their own review of the Susan Nagel Marie Therese, Child of Terror book:
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/books/review/Steiker-t.html?ref=todayspaper

The review, by Valerie Steiker, is critical of the book in a lukewarm way, like so much of the NYTBR's writing. It mentions the subject's restricted point-of-view, but fails to put the work within context of our society today-- and scarcely mentions its historical inaccuracy.

This may have something to do with the fact that Valerie Steiker is Culture editor at Vogue, a fashion magazine-- with that circumstance, the perusal was guaranteed to be superfical, as if the book were reviewed by a well-trained intelligent Persian cat.

Actually it's a miracle that Valerie Steiker wasn't glowing with praise, given that her magazine is at the heart of the Conde Nast magazine empire-- our own little aristocracy-- stomping grounds for many years of Tina Brown, Nagel's mentor. Can we guess that there will be polite tsks and frowns at a future Manhattan cocktail party? This is a narrow world, folks; a tiny little closed-mided insular and intellectually incestuous little world of superficial people living a "rarefied, peripatetic extistence," who happen to have billions of dollars of media clout behind them.