Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday November 28, 2010
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PAUL SIMON: A Life
Marc Eliot
Wiley
ISBN NA
313 pages
$30
Reviewed by Justin Moyer
Were Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel lovers? No, but Marc Eliot's serviceable biography of the duo's more prolific, more successful, shorter half gets kudos for raising that question about two folk superstars who loved the sound of bickering more than the sound of silence.
"Several of the songs on (the album "Bridge Over Troubled Water") explicitly point the accusatory finger of abandonment at Artie," writes Eliot, who has also published books about the Eagles and Bruce Springsteen. "To some, the finished album had a whiff of homoeroticism about it, as much of it seemed to be about the romantic breakup of a couple." But if Garfunkel spent too much time away from music dabbling in film, perhaps it was only because Simon had been trying to go solo since at least 1957, when as teenagers the pair scored the hit "Hey Schoolgirl" under the pseudonyms "Tom & Jerry."
Simon, of course, got the last laugh, composing and writing the quintuple-platinum masterpiece "Graceland" (1986) not long after Garfunkel's acting career had gone from "Catch-22" to B-movies like "Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession."
Eliot is less than convincing when he criticizes "the sociopolitically correct media lions forever waiting for celebrities at the arrival gates of every politically incorrect airport" who dared question Simon's decision to write "Graceland" in apartheid South Africa. But the author does pin down the source of his subject's notorious crankiness: "Paul was, and always would be, self-conscious about his height." Maybe all it takes to sell 5 million records is a robust Napoleon complex and a tall partner.
Justin Moyer can be reached at moyerj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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LEND ME YOUR EARS: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations
Anthony Jay
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978-0199572670
446 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Steven Levingston
In the aftermath of our recent apocalypse at the polls, it's handy to have a new, easy-to-browse political quotations book to remind us that, thank God, the world isn't ending: Politics has pretty much always been this way. Flip through editor Anthony Jay's "Lend Me Your Ears: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations," and you'll find endless comfort in words of wisdom from, say, Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of U.S. presidents, who offers this heartening revelation: "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organizations of hatreds." Whew! That's a relief. And shouldn't we feel reassured in a special way that Mao Zedong , poster boy of the heinous, nails our national discourse right on the head? "Politics," he said, "is war without bloodshed."
Let's lift our glasses to that!
"Lend Me Your Ears" burbles with political bon mots from across the continents and the centuries. Though it favors the wit of the British, it is packed with American voices, too: from Spiro Agnew ("If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.") to Tom Wolfe ("A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested"). There's a nearly 100-page keyword index at the back followed by a somewhat less useful and far more selective subject index. In his introduction to the first edition, included in this updated, fourth one, Jay notes: "New ideas in politics are always suspect, but recourse to quotation can show that your ideas, far from being new and tender shoots, are rooted deep in the history of political society."
And so we turn to the words of Samuel Johnson, English poet, critic and lexicographer, to show through an 18th-century lens why ill-fortuned politicians never seem to go away but rather write books for big advances, appear on late night talk shows and star on reality TV. As Johnson so aptly put it: "Politics are ... nothing more than means of rising in the world."
Ah yes, but there's that other matter: When you fall, as so many did in our latest electoral armageddon, what then? For those who felt the boot in the backside, H.L. Mencken has words of consolation: "Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse."
Steven Levingston can be reached at levingstons(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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