While The New York Times routinely ignores best-selling books by conservative authors like Mark Levin, the fake conservative the Times selected for their own editorial page received a rave review for his latest book in Sunday’s Book Review.
To review his new book The Road to Character, former Time writer Pico Iyer begins with a huge block of praise:
David Brooks’s gift — as he might put it in his swift, engaging way — is for making obscure but potent social studies research accessible and even startling, for seeing consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds and for ranging as widely across the private domain as the public. There aren’t many writers on politics who will study “emotional intelligence” as closely as they do polls, and fewer still extol failure as enthusiastically as they do success. Brooks’s flaws, as he tells us with typical cheerfulness and ease at the beginning of his new book, are that “I was born with a natural disposition toward shallowness” and “I’m paid to be a narcissistic blowhard” (the admission itself, of course, taking some of the edge off that “narcissistic”). He is, in short, a near-ideal public commentator (for this paper and for many other media outlets) because he is happy to sacrifice complexity and nuance in order to spin a hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story that sounds far less shrill and ad hominem than most of the polarizing rants of the day.
Iyer also concluded with spit and polish:
As it is, the author begins his book by saying it’s an attempt “to save my own soul,” then leaves his soul to tremble between the lines as he affirms uncertainty with the certainty of a recent convert. Two books ago, some readers may remember, he was confidently noting how calls to our “true inner self” leave no time for sleep and Augustine’s talk of original sin is “almost irrelevant” in blue-skied America. Yet those high-toned souls who turn away from his heartfelt sermon may be denying themselves real pleasure; for what Brooks’s solemn, often troubled, sometimes infuriating work reminds us is that there are few newspaper columnists who are more fun — and fruitful — to argue with. Putting the book down, I realized that it had never so excited me as when I was convinced that it was wrong.
It's not a completely positive review, but a clearly positive one. This is a repeat of what the Times offered to Brooks for his last book On Paradise Drive in 2004, when he was a fresh-faced Times hire. Michael Kinsley praised him in the most accurate way:
For several years, in the world of political journalism, David Brooks has been every liberal's favorite conservative. This is not just because he throws us a bone of agreement every now and then. Even the most poisonous propagandist (i.e., Bill O'Reilly) knows that trick. Brooks goes farther. In his writing and on television, he actually seems reasonable. More than that, he seems cuddly. He gives the impression of being open to persuasion. Like the elderly Jewish lady who thinks someone must be Jewish because ''he's so nice,'' liberals suspect that a writer as amiable as Brooks must be a liberal at heart. Some conservatives think so too.
There is a prize for being the liberals' favorite conservative, and Brooks has claimed it: a column in The New York Times.
