New Category: Maslin Watch

Adopting a journalist is way too hard. I'd rather just adopt a book reviewer. Of course, this kickoff's not all that in-depth, but I'll get deeper as I go along. (And hey, if anybody else wants to adopt a book reviewer, let me know and I'll mention it here; maybe even create a little section off to the side!)

I actually started a bit earlier with a look at her critic's notebook (though Old Hag really digs into the piece). But catching up with the arts sections from the last few days, I notice she describes The End of Blackness as not only a "dazzling diatribe" but also "a furious, bitterly funny indictment" of self-contempt among African-Americans.

Which will surely come as a surprise to Gerard Early, who also reviewed the book for the Times and came away with a much different reaction (again, noted by Lizzie).

Most black polemical writers of Dickerson's sort, from David Walker in his 1829 ''Appeal'' to W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1897 ''Conservation of the Races'' to Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, Amiri Baraka and Shelby Steele, whatever their politics, offer racial advice to blacks, because they have felt and continue to feel that black people, or some significant segment of them, need improvement for their own good, that black people need instruction in how to be black people of the kind the author thinks they should be. Although most black polemicists bristle at the suggestion that blacks are pathological, these books are driven by the view that the behavior and thinking that need correcting are so self-defeating as to require public censure. I find the prescriptive nature of this book and the others like it, including my own when they have been guilty of it, presumptuous and off-putting.

"The problems with this book are several and severe," he observes, going on to list a few of them, culminating in a truly brutal putdown at the end I'll let you discover for yourself. Maslin, on the other hand, claims

Ms. Dickerson deserves to fan the same kind of flames that made an academic celebrity of Camille Paglia, and that routinely catapults us-vs.-them screeds to the best-seller list.

First, is it too much to ask that the verb in a subordinate clause agree with the noun it modifies (flames-catapult)? Second, the entire metaphor is weak. You can't deserve to fan flames; you either have what it takes to fan flames or you don't. Paglia, for all the bogosity of her self-aggrandizing pronouncements, had what it took to fan flames, including the same Salon platform Dickerson has enjoyed.

As I say, future Maslin Watch entries will have more meat on their bones, but for now I just wanted to lay the project out there.