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"Nat King Cole" by Daniel Mark Epstein
A top-notch biography celebrates the jazz piano genius who gained his greatest fame as a pop singer.
By Greg Villepique
[11/12/99]

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Ghostly heart attacks, cancers and other assorted ills have plagued me for the last 31 years. Could the cause be my beloved job?
By David Alford
[11/12/99]

Buy low, sell high, sez Bard
In the latest cash-in-on-the-Bard book, the tragic heroes of Shakespeare are just losers who failed at crisis management.
By Ron Rosenbaum
[11/11/99]

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"Galileo's Daughter" by Dava Sobel
The life of the heretical Italian scientist is told through the loving, protective letters of his illegitimate child.
By Casey Greenfield
[11/11/99]

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Black and right
Thomas Sowell talks about the arrogance of liberal elites and the loneliness of the black conservative.
By Ray Sawhill
[11/10/99]

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By Gavin McNett

Nov. 12, 1999 | One thing you have to grant Starbucks: A lot of Americans are now drinking decent coffee, whereas not long ago, the best you could count on finding throughout most of the country was 40-weight diner mud. You also have to say something of that nature for Oprah's Book Club, for the Martha Stewart empire and for Target, Wal-Mart and the rest of our neutron-bomb superstores.

Owing to their efforts, it's now possible to make a random parachute jump into almost any part of the country with a scavenger-hunt list of diverse, formerly haute-middlebrow items -- such as faux-Victorian wall-trim appliqués, severe-looking desk lamps, walnut veneer picture frames, palazzo pants, extra virgin olive oil, dried serrano chiles and Anna Quindlen novels -- and to be reasonably sure of greeting the rescue plane at the end of the day with a full load of swag. The level of our mass taste -- the Public Brow -- has been surging upward over the past several years, and it's hard not to see that as some kind of victory for American culture, and for our domestic grace-and-dignity index, no matter what commercial forces might be mustered behind it, or how compromised and tricked-up much of the stuff may actually be.

Also Today Silence the snobs! They may look down their noses at Oprah, but what have the literati done for books lately? By Mary Elizabeth Williams

But ultimately there are those factors to think about; and in the case of the Book Club, there's also the matter of what America thinks it's choosing when it listens to Oprah's advice, passes on the new Danielle Steel novel and reaches instead for the Quindlen. Home furnishings, et al., are supposed to express your tastes and reinforce your ideas of what's good in the world. They succeed or fail according to how much pleasure you derive from them. But Oprah's book club is supposed to improve you, to guide you toward becoming a better, wiser person.

It's questionable that reading good books will do that in the first place, considering how writers and college professors generally turn out. But even if reading does enhance the character, most of the books that Oprah recommends are designed to have just the opposite effect: to play on base sentiment, to reaffirm popular wisdom, to tell readers what they expect to hear and to help them learn what they already know. They're designed, like any sort of middlebrow dry-good or specialty food on the shelves at Target or Starbucks, to express their readers' (and Oprah's) tastes, and to reinforce what they think is right and wrong in the world.

Most of the books chosen for the Book Club come with an easy issue and a correct opinion already attached, such as the domestic violence of Quindlen's "Black and Blue" (you're against it), the womanliness of Chris Bohjalian's "Midwives" (you're for it) and the blunt racio-sexual politics of Maya Angelou, Edwidge Danticat, Breena Clarke and others (you identify with brave Little Topsy in a world of Simon Legrees). Ralph Ellison's historic, compelling "Juneteenth" came and went, unrecommended by Oprah. But Clarke's "River, Cross My Heart," a poorly written, sentimental novel from a diversity bureaucrat at Time Inc., was launched into the rosters last month. You're for it.

There have been some strong, interesting books to appear on the list over the years, including Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader," a stark, ambiguous German novel about a man who struggles with guilt and forgiveness upon discovering that the woman he loves was a brutal concentration-camp guard during the war. Anita Shreve's "The Pilot's Wife" is a good, substantial piece of work, as is Jane Hamilton's "The Book of Ruth." But the salient qualities of these books aren't their raw worth as literature -- they are, respectively, "the Holocaust," "women" and "women."

And these are, of course, important subjects. But aside from "The Reader" and Ursula Hegi's "Stones From the River," which represent an odd trend toward sympathy for the German side of the Holocaust, it doesn't require much greatness of soul or much hard thinking -- it doesn't, in short, entail much potential for improvement -- for an audience composed almost entirely of women to identify with the travails of sympathetic feminine characters. Even Hitler, after all, was committed to the idea of justice for, and fair treatment of, people like Hitler.

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