After the Tall Timber

January 19, 2015
Journalist and novelist Adler (Speedboat) offers what she considers the best of her essays in this large, bracing volume. She doesn’t shy away from colorful details, such as “Dickensian characters” on the Sunset Strip or “picnics at the front” on the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War, but she is at her best covering “turning points,” from a Black Power march in Mississippi in 1966 to the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. One of her favored methods of criticizing powerful, influential figures is making lists, such as film critic Pauline Kael’s “favorite” (and overused) words, or Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s references, throughout their book The Brethren, to the Supreme Court Justices’ “moods and feelings.” Adler’s opinions are as reasoned as they are relentless. She assails with absolute conviction, as she proves in her rebukes of Kael and Robert Bork, among others. Perhaps the most fascinating piece is a lengthy, sympathetic profile of G. Gordon Liddy during a 1980 book tour. Elsewhere, she produces interesting juxtapositions with essays about the abuse of presidential power in the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky scandals. These selections, united by a persistent theme of the “misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and... the journalist’s role in it,” demonstrate that Adler’s uncompromising insistence on accuracy and accountability is what ultimately makes her writing so incisive.

January 15, 2015
A collection of articles by an outspoken writer.Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Wolff (The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, 2008, etc.) gathers 20 pieces of Adler's nonfiction, published between 1965 and 2003, which serve as a witness to history and evidence of her hard-hitting journalism. In the 1960s and '70s, Adler was prominent, opinionated and often controversial. Her career, Wolff writes, went "wrong, or at least astray...primarily for not being able to hold her tongue." In 1968, working as a book reviewer for the New Yorker, she "no longer saw the point of reviewing other people's books" unless they were important. When the New York Times offered her a post as movie critic, she took that, only to become irritated by the obligation to review movies she thought unworthy of attention, her editors' stylistic strictures and the newspaper's objection to her "excessively scathing" reviews. She quit after 14 months, returning to the New Yorker, where she continued as a staff writer for 40 years. Articles on the Six-Day War; the 1965 civil rights march in Selma; a Black Power march in Mississippi, with deft cameo portraits of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King; and Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court represent some of her work there. When the New Yorker changed ownership in 1985, Adler made enemies by writing a book that was harshly critical of its new editors and several prominent writers. She made more enemies after publishing an 8,000-word article in the New York Review of Books excoriating Pauline Kael's When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews. Adler deemed the book "piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Adler's nonfiction has been available in other collections, whose introductions are included in this one. Although this volume amply reveals the author's attention to language and commitment to politically engaged journalism, many pieces seem dated, and a few are tediously long.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from March 1, 2015
Renata Adler is a clarion, often controversial critic, reporter, and novelist highly visible in the 1960s and 1970s. She was as tuned-in to the zeitgeist and as intrepid in her interpretation and articulation as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. And she was just as photogenic with her signature long braid, no minor quality when it came to that era's superficial media response to female intellectuals. Yet Adler all but vanished from the scene, ostracized by her peers for her fierce candor. In 2013, an Adler revival began. Her epigrammatic and haunting novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), were reissued. Now this incandescent volume brings readers the fire and depth of Adler's trenchant nonfiction. Born in Milan in 1938 after her parents fled Nazi Germany, Adler grew up in Connecticut and pursued an arduous education, studying philosophy and German at Bryn Mawr, comparative literature at Harvard, and philosophy and linguistics at the Sorbonne. She then earned a law degree at Yale. Her braininess and training made her a rigorous observer, researcher, analyst, and writer. Facts matter to Adler, so does language. This assiduousness and devotion to the truth is the source of both her literary power and the fury she ignited. Adler became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1963. She wrote book reviews for a while, then asked the now legendary editor, William Shawn, if she could go down south to report on the civil rights movement. She went to Selma, Alabama, and chronicled the long, dangerous march to Montgomery, the state capitol. She was in her element as a reporter, working in the long-form style the New Yorker perfected and popularized. The March for Non-Violence from Selma opens this collection, and it is a model of astutely witnessed, thoroughly considered, and calmly dramatic writing. In a completely different world and vibe, Adler captures the scene on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip in 1966. In Letter from the Six Day War, she chronicles life in Israel in June 1967 as the besieged nation, a geographical absurdity, defended itselfa vivid report presaging the ongoing struggles for peace. She also traveled to Nigeria during the civil war and wrote Letter from Biafra. Though Adler was ensconced at the very epicenter of the privileged Left, she is scouring in her condemnation of its fuzzy thinking and pretensions, and she avidly traveled with G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate infamy, on his book tour to write a lengthy, humanizing profile. Another knock-out piece is her delving history of the National Guard, written after the shooting deaths of four college students at Kent State in 1970, an essay freshly shocking in this time of renewed concerns about overly aggressive law enforcement. Adler brought her legal training and insistence on precision to her tenacious analysis of the Watergate case, the six-volume Starr Report on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision. These deep immersions in difficult political terrain inspired her to roundly castigate the sloppy, craven commercial press. Eloquent indignation powers much of this tome, but Adler is also acerbically funny, especially in her introduction to A Year in the Dark, a collection of her reviews as chief film critic at the New York Times. And speaking of movies, here, too, is Adler's notoriously harsh review of long-reigning film critic Pauline Kael's collection, When the Lights Go Down (1980). This unforgiven New York Times critique, which contains an overlooked yet keenly thoughtful dissection of the challenges involved in being a staff reviewer on perpetual deadline, sent Adler into exile. Until now. After the Tall Timber is a sumptuously...