emergency review of books blog

--November 10, 2007--TV Writers’ Strike Leaves Jilted Authors Looking for a Bully Pulpit. David Levy’s publisher had built his entire book tour around a scheduled appearance on “The Colbert Report” last Monday. But then the members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike, and Mr. Colbert’s show went to repeats, leaving Mr. Levy to promote his book “Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships” (HarperCollins) through radio interviews and answering questions from about 70 people who attended a reading at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan. NYT

--LEADERSHIP, Rudolf Giuliani: There is an entire chapter in Rudy Giuliani’s famous book “Leadership” that is titled “Loyalty, the Vital Virtue.” In it, he pats himself on the back for making a man named Robert Harding the city’s budget director even though he knew the ever-feckless news media would point out that Harding’s father, Ray, was the chairman of the city’s Liberal Party, whose endorsement had done a great deal to get Giuliani elected mayor. “I wasn’t going to choose a lesser candidate simply to quiet the critics,” he said. For some mysterious reason, the book skips over a much better loyalty lesson involving the very same family. Giuliani demonstrated his loyalty to Ray Harding, giver of the Liberal Party endorsement, not only by giving his qualified son a good job, but also by turning over the New York City Housing Development Corporation to another son, Russell, who wound up embezzling more than $400,000 for vacations, gifts and parties. We will not even go into the pornography part, except to point out in his defense that of the 15,000 sexually explicit images found on his computer, only a few were of children. --NYT Gail Collins,

--THE LETTERS OF NOEL COWARD---"How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door in the face of age. Much wiser to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance." –Noel Coward, WSJ 11-10-07