PLUS: The year in books By Dwight Garner Hands were wrung, insults were flung and the future of publishing was fretted over in what turned out to be a grand year for books, after all T A B L E+T A L K Wishing you could get your $25 and 6 hours back? Join the Table Talk discussion on the worst or most overrated new books of 1997. R E V I E W S FOR SHAME: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture An inquiry into "the loss of common decency in American culture," from an author known for his critique of advertising (12/24/97) R E C E N T L Y Were the '60s a fraud? By Gary Kamiya (12/22/97) Save these books! By Dwight Garner (12/04/97) The art of life By Jay Parini (11/19/97) The Gospel according to Paul By Mark Hertsgaard (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Books feature archive As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir The Mansion on the Hill The Alamo Hand to Mouth Dewey Defeats Truman Resentment Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities The Royals Underworld The Confession of O. J. Simpson: A Work of Fiction Hapworth 16, 1924 The Kiss Tetherballs of Bougainville Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life The Day After Roswell The Other Woman: My Life With O. J. Simpson My Brother Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age All Over but the Shoutin'		The worst books of 1997 page 2 of 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Peter Kurth WORST: For Worst Book of the Year, I considered nominating every volume published on the O. J. Simpson case since the end of the trial, but finally settled on Paula Barbieri's "The Other Woman: My Life With O. J. Simpson" (Little, Brown). Words are not sufficient (or necessary) to describe the awfulness of this book -- the florid prose, the heaving breasts, the plucky resolve and unshakable Christian faith of its hare-brained author, a "personal devotion to Jesus Christ" that prevents Barbieri, in the end, from answering the only question anyone cares about. You know what I mean, and so does she. America wants inches, Paula, inches and circumference. Failing that, it's back to Victoria's Secret with you. I regret to report that it was my own -- ex -- agent who brokered a $3.5 million advance for this cynical junk, and my own publishers, Little, Brown, who were stupid enough to pay it. MOST OVERRATED: The most overrated book of 1997, hands down, is Jamaica Kincaid's "My Brother" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), another in Kincaid's ongoing cycle of abused-daughter diatribes that has the nerve to pose as a book about her brother's struggle with AIDS. Kincaid has only one subject, and that's herself -- more specifically, the wrongs she thinks were done to her as a child by her domineering mother. I reviewed "My Brother" for Salon and gave it only the praise it deserved -- as a vaguely poetic, intermittently hypnotic exercise in resentment and revenge. How it got nominated for a National Book Award I'll never know. Peter Kurth is a writer and biographer who lives in Burlington, Vt. - - - > Salon's review of "My Brother" David Futrelle WORST: In all honesty, the worst book I read all year was a quickie book about Heaven's Gate. But it seems a tad unfair to dump the indignity of this award on authors already suffering from two major handicaps: 1) They wrote the book in six days and 2) they work for the New York Post. So I bestow the honor instead on the always outraged Andrea Dworkin and her book "Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women" (Free Press). (Big on understated titles, Dworkin is.) Dworkin tries her best to work us all into a lather. But her reflexive rhetorical overkill serves to cloud rather than clarify the issues. And by collapsing the distinctions between issues that really are life-and-death (rape, brutality) and some that are not (Playboy centerfolds), she manages to trivialize all she touches. "Intercourse" and "Pornography: Men Possessing Women" may indeed have been, as her publicist rather perversely puts it, "seminal works," but "Life and Death" is Dworkin by-the-numbers. (Fans of '60s radicalism will be happy to note that she still spells it "Amerika.") MOST OVERRATED: Like that awful Christmas muzak that permeates the brain from Halloween through New Year's, Esther Dyson is inescapable these days. Look -- there she is standing in a pool in Vanity Fair! There she is casually trashing a hotel room in London's Daily Telegraph! There she is frantically looking for a fax machine in ... er ... Salon. Trouble is, while Esther herself is quite colorful, "Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age" (Broadway Books), her new book, is anything but -- it's 300 pages of bland generalities on such riveting subjects as online résumés and Cyber Nannies, interrupted on occasion by various crackpot notions that rival those of her famous father (Freeman Dyson) in their daft grandeur. (In the future, she says, writers will make most of their money as "performers.") But there are, alas, too few of these to justify the book's purchase price -- much less her million-dollar advance. David Futrelle is a regular contributor to Salon. - - - > Salon's review of "Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age" Stephanie Zacharek WORST: Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Rick Bragg's memoir "All Over but the Shoutin'"(Pantheon) is a true story that reads like a steaming heap. Bragg grew up dirt-poor and fatherless in Alabama, raised by a loving mother who sacrificed everything for her children. After working his tail off at various newspapers, he rose to fame and fortune at the Times -- he refers to it as "the temple" of his profession -- and we're all invited to ooh and ah over the number of awards he's won as a journalist. That's just one way in which Bragg is insufferable: He also milks his background for all it's worth, overwriting shamelessly about details like the holes in his mother's sneakers (they're mentioned at least three times) and how she scrimped to buy him a class ring made of genuine metal and red glass. Eventually, he saved enough money to buy his mother a house, with real windows that open and shut and everything. That must have taken a lot of hard work, but it's nothing compared with the chore of plowing toward the last page of this book. MOST OVERRATED: There were people who claimed that Kathryn Harrison's colorless, arid memoir "The Kiss" (Random House) met with criticism because society just can't accept a woman who writes frankly about her sexuality. But I'd say Harrison's frankness isn't the issue: Why does she have to be so goddamn boring? In "The Kiss," Harrison reveals that she had an affair with her father while she was in her 20s, and you don't doubt that she's suffered real pain over the years as a result of it. But the emotion Harrison is most interested in describing is numbness, and eventually she's just, well, numbing. Her prose ("The exhaustion of withstanding his desire is not supportable") is so enervated that every sentence could use its own fainting couch. If this is how she writes about a life-changing experience, I'd sure hate to see her grocery list. Stephanie Zacharek regularly reviews movies for Salon. - - - > Salon's review of "All Over but the Shoutin'" - - - > Salon's review of "The Kiss" N E X T+P A G E+| Shocking news! Princess Margaret is unpleasant!