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Books Update from NYTimes.com

Friday, February 2, 200
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Microsoft's Blunders; Two Writers in One Body
1. In Sunday's Book Review: Two Takes on Microsoft's Antitrust Case
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Don DeLillo's "The Body Artist"
3. Featured Author: Two Writers, One Man
4. New in Stores: Ann Crittenden's "The Price of Motherhood"
5. In the News: Book Critics Pick Finalists for Awards
6. New on the Best-Seller List
7. In the Forums: Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man"

1. In Sunday's Book Review: Two Takes on Microsoft's Antitrust Case
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Millions for Defense
Microsoft, two new books seem to show, lost its antitrust case by defending too much too often

>>>>WORLD WAR 3.0
Microsoft and Its Enemies.
By Ken Auletta.
Illustrated. 436 pp.
New York: Random House. $27.95.

"Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era," by John Heilemann
"World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies," by Ken Auletta Microsoft and its lawyers, writes Ken Auletta in "World War 3.0," believed that "their mission was to refute nearly every assertion submitted by a government witness." They practiced "cross-examination by checklist" and "often meandered into baffling digressions." In the end, John Heilemann writes in "Pride Before the Fall," "the overarching impression conveyed by Microsoft's defense was one of indiscriminate flailing." As reviewer Adam Liptak, a senior counsel in the legal department of The New York Times Company, writes, "Because the coverage of the trial in the daily press and in the business magazines was of exceptionally high quality, there is little fresh material from the trial itself in these two books." This is true despite the fact that Heilemann is a "perceptive observer and a fine writer," and "Pride Before the Fall" is "full of sharp portraits of the participants, pithy and colorful quotations and a veritable pileup of telling anecdotes. His sense of the legal issues is sure and sophisticated." Auletta's book is based on an article from The New Yorker. "In book form, it has metastasized into something quite unmanageable. There is a lot going on in 'World War 3.0,' but little of it is engaging as narrative or valuable as commentary."
Web Special:
Coverage of the Microsoft Antitrust Trial

2. Also Reviewed This Week: Don DeLillo's "The Body Artist"
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"If you haven't yet woken up to the beauty of Don DeLillo's sentences, here's your chance," writes Adam Begley, who is books editor of The New York Observer. "The Body Artist," is "a tiny, intimate affair, quiet, spare and strange -- but not so strange as to distract from the glories of the chiseled prose."
His first novel since "Underworld," the "magnificent 827-page postwar panorama he published four years ago," is a metaphysical ghost story about a woman alone and not alone in a large rented seaside house. Begley concludes, "All the way through, 'The Body Artist' requires close attention to each word in each artfully made sentence."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/04/reviews/010204.04begleyt.html?0202bk

Featured Author: Don DeLillo
This retrospective includes reviews of DeLillo's novels "White Noise" (1985), "Libra" (1988), "Underworld" (1997) and others, as well as two audio recordings of DeLillo -- an interview and a reading.
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"Sister India," by Peggy Payne
Estelle, the protagonist of "Sister India," Peggy Payne's second novel, is 400 pounds of "enthralling proof," writes reviewer Deborah Mason, a critic whose work appears in Elle and other magazines. "As a blond beanpole of a girl, she fled her North Carolina home to blot out the premature wreckage of her young womanhood and found sanctuary in Varanasi (also called Benares), the holiest of India's Hindu cities."
- From the novel's very first sentence, Mason writes, "her ravaged voice grips the reader, her words so blunt, so scalded with disillusion, that they feel as if they've been bitten off and spat out." The "doggedness" of that "prickly, contradictory voice that gives the novel its lacerating strength, keeping it -- for the most part -- from glib solutions and easy promises of salvation."
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"A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603," by Simon Schama
The BBC, the world's foremost public service broadcaster, has marked the millennium with a televised "History of Britain." Imaginatively, the program is narrated and written by a single person, Simon Schama, who, as an author and a professor successively at Harvard and Columbia, is "one of the most celebrated historians alive," writes Patrick Wormald, a historian at Oxford.
"As drama, Schama's narrative -- for film and book alike -- is magnificent," writes Wormald, "He should set a fashion for the revival of the art, almost forgotten by professional academics, of good storytelling. But might it not also matter to get the historical details right? Apparently not, in the view of Schama and his team of researchers. For the early medieval period in which I specialize, I found an average of two mistakes per page."
Another of "the book's failings" is its title. "As a History of Britain, it is laughable. Ireland gets about two pages of serious discussion."

3. Featured Author: Two Writers, One Man
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"Candyland: A Novel in Two Parts," by Evan Hunter and Ed McBain
Evan Hunter and Ed McBain are two writers and one man (Ed McBain is Hunter's pseudonym). As reviewer Bruce DeSilva explains, "Hunter writes mainstream novels that are always seriously, even if not always warmly, reviewed," and McBain writes well-regarded police procedurals.
"I've always imagined these writers were jealous of each other," DeSilva writes, "Hunter hungering for McBain's popularity and McBain envious of Hunter's literary stature." In DeSilva's view, "The novel is a gimmick, and it is a surprise that it works at all. That it works so superbly is a tribute to the skills of this great storyteller."

4. New in Stores: Ann Crittenden's "The Price of Motherhood"
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"The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued," by Ann Crittenden, February
An economics journalist concludes from her study that society does not adequately reimburse the labor associated with motherhood.

5. In the News: Book Critics Pick Finalists for Awards
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Zadie Smith, a best-selling author at 24, and Jacques Barzun, a best-selling author at 92, are among the nominees for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/arts/30BOOK.html?0202bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0202bk

6. New on the Best-Seller List
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Hardcover Fiction
#2) "A Darkness More Than Night," by Michael Connelly
While investigating the murder of a movie actress, Detective Harry Bosch becomes the chief suspect in another homicide case.
A note on our best-seller policy: The Times on the Web publishes the New York Times best-seller lists a week in advance of the printed Sunday Book Review. The best-seller lists published this week on the Web will appear in the print edition dated Feb. 11 and are based on sales through last weekend.

7. In the Forums: Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man"
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The Reading Group has begun its discussion of the February book, Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man." Published in 1857, the novel is one of Melville's least known, and readers are trying to make sense of its unusual structure, topical satires and dense allusions. One reader says that "Melville deals with both historical and literary allusions extensively . . . without (I think) coming off as pretentious." Readers have begun to search out the sources of some of these references: one has found echoes of essays by Poe and Hazlitt in Melville's meditations on literary characters.
Participants in the American History forum are preparing to discuss "Freedom From Fear," David M. Kennedy's account of the Depression era. As they finish the book, readers have begun a preliminary discussion about Herbert Hoover. One reader comments on Kennedy's relatively sympathetic portrait of Hoover: "He doesn't make him a hero, but he makes the reader think differently about the man." Another reader, while recalling his "reputation as a humanitarian -- earned during and after World War I," insists that Hoover "made some critical mistakes in his handling of the Depression."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0202bk
Those of you who live in the New York area might want to watch to my weekly appearance on WNBC's "Saturday Today in New York" (Channel 4, 9-10:30 a.m.). In this Saturday's segment I'll talk about several books reviewed this week, including Don DeLillo's new novel, as well as Michael Connelly's "A Darkness More Than Night" and others. The segment will air at about 10 a.m. Please let me know your reactions to the segment if you have a chance to tune in. (The videos of my last few television appearances are available on a Web site The Times and WNBC have created:
http://www.wnbc.com/bookreview/weekend.html.)
Feel free to forward this e-mail to a friend, and to drop me a note with your feedback about the site. I enjoy hearing your opinions, ideas and suggestions and will do my best to respond individually to each e-mail.
Bill Goldstein
Books Editor
The New York Times on the Web
bill@nytimes.com

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