Two Sane Books Out of Three

Before I note two wonderfully sane books which have just been published, I'd like to first witness the reception to another book published in the same season, a book which is neither suggestively mad nor lucidly sane—John Frohnmayers Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior. Once upon a blue moon John Frohnmayer was the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, and his "confession" is one of the first memoirs to surface from the Bush administration. In reviewing the book elsewhere, I wrote that "the primary tension in the man's [Frohnmayers] thinking seems to be the tension between naivete and stupidity." I found the book to be inaccurately self-justifying, whiny, and idiotic, and I said so. I'll let that stand as my basic judgment of the book. Normally I would have let things go at that, but I began to notice that Frohnmayer and the book seemed to be popping up all over the place. Locally Leaving Town Alive was featured prominently in the window of Harvard Bookstore, the book was on a display table at the Harvard Coop bookstore, and the Coop was even advertising the confession in its catalogue with the copy. "Fired after two and a half years as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the author presents an eloquent plea for the liberation of American culture from the narrow concerns of partisan politics." I wondered if the buyers for these stores or the writer of the catalogue copy had actually read the book. (Is anyone minding the store over there?)