The plot continues to thicken around Maureen Dowd's controversial new book.
Arianna at Huffington Post has a killer post about the New York Times' "bitch-slap" review of Are Men Necessary?
As we've repeatedly seen, the New York Times is screwed up in more ways than one. Here is another log on the bonfire:
What was Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, thinking when he assigned Maureen Dowd's new book to Kathryn Harrison -- a writer who Dowd had previously slammed not in one, but two different columns?
. . .[W]hen Dowd complained to Tanenhaus about the curious choice of book reviewer, he suggested that if she didn't like criticism, she shouldn't write books, but acknowledged Harrison had admitted that she remembered having been mentioned in Dowd's columns. Even that, though, didn't raise any red flags. And no elementary Google search followed.
If it had, it would have revealed that in 1997, after Harrison hit the best-seller lists with "The Kiss," her memoir of her four-year sexual affair with her father, Dowd described Harrison's book as an example of a hot subgenre: "Creepy people talking about creepy people." In another column a few months later, Dowd included Harrison in a group of "vengeful" memoirists.
So can it really be a surprise that, given the chance, the "creepy" and "vengeful" Harrison pulled out her stiletto and carved up Dowd and Are Men Necessary??
"Like most people who work hard at seeming to be naturally funny," wrote Harrison, "Maureen Dowd comes across as someone who very much wants to be liked." She also asserted that Dowd's skill as a columnist "does not enable her to produce a book-length exploration of a topic as complex as the relations between the sexes." While screwing your father for four years gives you the perfect perspective from which to review a book on the relations between the sexes? ...
Obviously, Dowd shouldn't get special treatment from her own paper -- but shouldn't she, like any other author, be afforded protection from hostile reviewers? Payback is a bitch-slap.
Read the whole thing..
Maureen Dowd feminism Politics Media New York Times
