Books, 6/28.

J Hoberman in the London Review of Books on Daniel Leab's Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm: "[H]owever the CIA's fervent call for an anti-Soviet revolt (with 'help from the outside') was received by the world, it was rendered moot some eighteen months after Animal Farm's European release by the much encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising."

In the Austin Chronicle, Ken Lieck reviews Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film: "One might expect the contents to be drier than James Bond's martini. Surprisingly, given the blurbs' overwrought sense of urgency, the quintet of academically sound essays within has much to offer all cinephiles."

"The Shamus has never really thought much about Bruce Dern.... But I'll want to see a lot more of Dern's work after reading his smart, breezy, stream-of-ego memoir, Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have. Its subtitle is 'An Unrepentant Memoir' and boy, is it ever."

Jeanine Basinger reviews This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood: "Just as he kept a lid on fear under combat stress, a lid on President Johnson (no doubt a lid the size of Kansas) and a lid on the leaders of Hollywood, [Jack] Valenti keeps his memoir firmly under control. He tells only what he wants to tell, disappearing behind platitudes or quotations from Emerson, Faulkner and others when camouflage is needed."

Also in the New York Times, Motoko Rich: "As the diehard fans of Harry Potter count the minutes until they can get their hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the monumentally successful series by JK Rowling, they are engaging in a frenzy of speculation and rumor-mongering about what will happen to their beloved characters."

Just so: The Philadelphia City Paper's Summer Book Quarterly.

Online listening tip. The Washington Post Magazine's Summer Reading Issue. Ann Patchett, Terry McMillan, Nathan Englander, Rick Moody and Nicholas Montemarano read their nonfiction memoirs of summer. Via Bookforum.

Posted by dwhudson at June 28, 2007 12:56 PM