Review of reviews: Books

Book of the week

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

by Lee Siegel

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(Spiegel & Grau, $23)

A little over a year ago, literary critic Lee Siegel was suspended from his position at The New Republic for a perceived violation of Internet ethics. Using the log-in name Sprezzatura, he had been posting strident comments about his own writings on the magazine’s Web site. As Sprezzatura, he wrote that Lee Siegel was “brave, brilliant,” and funnier than Jon Stewart. He wrote that Lee Siegel’s critics “hate him because they want to write like him.” He labeled one detractor a “panting and obsequious” suck-up. Exposed, Siegel was widely pilloried. But he now says there was an upside to his “rollicking misadventure in the online world.” It gave him a springboard to write the book he’d already been contemplating, about how Internet culture is debasing us all.

Siegel turns out to be a surprisingly “sane, fair,” and “cogent” observer of the Web’s sinister side, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. An “inchoate malaise” afflicts many of us who make Web-surfing a regular habit, and Against the Machine performs the considerable service of pinpointing some sources of our queasiness. Though Siegel opens with the hackneyed image of a Starbucks cafe in which every customer is isolated from all others by an addiction to laptop screens, he accurately captures the dystopian creepiness of the scene. How did this technology, which promised so much freedom, become “so regimented and constricting”? What price will we pay for transferring so much time, energy, and curiosity to a medium that encourages anonymity and commodifies our every move?

Siegel is ill-equipped to finish that argument, said Louis Bayard in Salon

.com. What troubles him most is the debasing effect of mass participation in the construction of art and culture, but his rhetoric “draws from the same well of hysteria” as the online vitriol he denounces. As much as Siegel would like to paint all regular Web users as single-minded zombies, most of us are “too much in the world” to let one pastime swallow our souls. Another writer should attempt a sober analysis of what the Internet is doing to us, said James Harkin in the London Financial Times. Though “Siegel writes a mean and memorable sentence,” he’s too flip to be truly constructive.

This Common Secret:

My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

by Susan Wicklund with Alan Kesselheim

(PublicAffairs, $25)

Abortions are a much more common procedure in America than most people think, says Susan Wicklund. An abortion provider for the past two decades, Wicklund claims that 40 percent of American women have abortions during their childbearing years. She has seen how varied women’s circumstances can be. Once she refused to abort a baby who was later murdered by its father. Once she performed an abortion for a rape victim who learned, too late, that the fetus had been conceived in a loving relationship before the attack. She has seen pro-life demonstrators return to the picket lines outside her clinics within a week of abortions they elected to have themselves.

The “riveting” stories in Wicklund’s valuable new memoir begin with a compelling bit of personal history, said Emily Bazelon in The Washington Post. The Wisconsin-bred author was an unmarried 22-year-old when she underwent a “ghastly” abortion in 1976; she was an impoverished 26-year-old single mother when she decided to pursue a college degree. Eventually, she committed to her career as a roving full-time abortion provider. Some of her horror stories sound “a bit too perfectly exemplary to be true,” said Jonathan Leaf in the New York Post. Skeptical readers will also notice that Wicklund’s own family suffered from her conviction that her work was helping to create healthier homes. She admits that the 100-hour weeks she spent traveling among clinics in three rural states ruined her second marriage and forced her daughter to navigate adolescence with scant help from Mom.

That kind of honesty is what makes This Common Secret such a brave book, said Eyal Press in The New York Times. Wicklund’s stories aren’t always artfully told. But in sharing the heartbreak of that rape victim and revisiting similar experiences that depart from “the conventional pro-choice script,” she is exhibiting the same fortitude that allowed her to continue her practice when death threats were pouring in and other abortion doctors were being murdered. To Wicklund, acknowledging that an abortion can prove a tragic personal choice isn’t an argument for stiffer government restrictions on the procedure. The very difficulty of the decision, she believes, is why every woman considering abortion must be supported in making “an informed, truly independent choice.”