NY Times Book Critic Hails Obama's 'Radical Empathy' & 'Complex Ideas'

Clay Waters
December 11th, 2020 4:20 PM

Former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani fulfilled her reputation for sucking up to President Barack Obama (while damning biographies that came up short of hagiography) in her long interview, “Self-Portrait Of a Storyteller And a President." In January 2009 she praised Obama’s "love of fiction and poetry" that "imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of…

 

NY Times' Kakutani: 2010s ‘Dark and Divisive New Era’ Because of Trump

Clay Waters
December 29th, 2019 6:36 PM
Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic for the New York Times, saw out the decade in paranoid fashion, laying out her left-wing overview of the 2010s in the Sunday Review, “The End of Normal -- Over the past decade, social media, the Great Recession and Donald Trump combined to bring out the ‘indigenous American berserk." She ranted: "With his calls to 'Make America Great Again,' Mr. Trump…
 

NYT Deflects MLK ‘Rape’ Bombshell by Personally Attacking Historian

Clay Waters
June 5th, 2019 10:31 PM
The New York Times suddenly distrusts left-wing scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Luther King Jr. biographer David Garrow. Why? Because the scholar unearthed F.B.I archives suggesting the civil rights icon once laughed along as a colleague raped a woman in his presence in a hotel. Garrow’s bombshell piece was rejected by many news outlets, including the Times (which actually ran an pre-…
 

NYT: Trump Doesn’t Read A Word, Pro-Trump Books for Conspiracy Section

Clay Waters
December 2nd, 2018 3:53 PM
Saturday’s New York Times featured unhidden, extraneous hostility toward the president’s reading habits, in a snarky story more fitting to Sunday Styles or the opinion section then the news section. In “Books Trump Can Praise Without Reading a Word,” Katie Rogers quickly termed pro-Trump books from the likes of Jeanine Pirro and Gregg Jarrett to be “conspiracy theory.”  It marks a 180 degree tilt…
 

NYT’s Strange, Soft Profile of Accused Killer: ‘An Attentive Father’

Clay Waters
August 25th, 2018 10:01 AM
Saturday’s New York Times provided a soft profile of Cristhian Rivera, the accused killer of Mollie Tibbetts: “From Quiet Village in Mexico to a Lonely Furrow in an Iowa Cornfield.” They wrote: "Cristhian Bahena Rivera, the Mexican farmworker accused of killing a 20-year-old college student and concealing her body beneath corn leaves, seemed to have built a quiet, productive life in the seven or…
 

NYT Critic Kakutani's ‘The Death of Truth' Hits Trump, 'Fringe Right'

Clay Waters
July 30th, 2018 10:44 AM
For years, Michiko Kakutani was the most feared and revered New York Times book critic. Now the reviewer becomes the reviewed with her new book with a self-explanatory title: The Death of Truth – Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. On the plus side, it’s short. Yet this slim, 173-page undersized hardback still manages to be a slow read, dense and repetitive. The widely read Kakutani uses…
 

Retired NYT Critic Returns to Praise 'Eliot Ness' Comey’s Trump Attack

Clay Waters
April 14th, 2018 12:22 PM
The release of former FBI director James Comey’s book coaxed Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times’s former, famously influential chief book critic out of retirement and, unusually, into the news pages of Friday’s edition: “James Comey Has a Story to Tell. It’s Very Persuasive.” Kakutani was given over 2,000 words and a full news page to offer praise for A Higher Loyalty -- Truth, Lies, And…
 

NYT Critic Hits Critical Obama Bio From Pulitzer Winner as 'Unworthy'

Clay Waters
May 2nd, 2017 3:00 PM
New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani made the front of the Arts section Tuesday with her disgusted take on a new biography of Barack Obama by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow, “On Obama; And On, And On, And ON -- A biography takes a long, long look at the former president’s early years.”
 

NYT: ‘Eerie Parallels' in Dystopian Books and Trump Presidency

Clay Waters
January 28th, 2017 5:00 PM
Hysterical liberals are rushing to buy dystopian novels like 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, regarding them as playbooks for the new Trump administration, and the New York Times is eagerly validating their fears: "...in recent months, [Handmaid's Tale author Margaret] Atwood has been hearing from anxious readers who see eerie parallels between the novel’s oppressive society and the current…
 

NYT Book Critic's Front-Page Shocker: Thoughtful Obama Likes To Read

Clay Waters
January 17th, 2017 9:25 AM
The front of Monday’s New York Times presented some truly groundbreaking journalism: President Obama likes to read. Book critic and Obama idolizer Michiko Kakutani’s long farewell piece was plotted to make the departing president look like a thoughtful intellectual: “How Reading Nourished Obama During the White House Years.” It’s the sequel, awaited by no one, to her front-page report from…
 

NYT Critic Compares Slavery to Current Police Controversies

Clay Waters
August 4th, 2016 8:22 AM

New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani is notorious about letting her personal liberal politics infect her aesthetic judgment. In January 2009 she praised incoming president Barack Obama’s "love of fiction and poetry" that "imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition," as opposed to President George W. Bush's "prescriptive" reading that…

 

NY Times Gushes Over Feminist HBO Star's 'Smart, Funny' Book

Tim Graham
September 24th, 2014 4:59 PM
Few people are as beloved by the liberal media as HBO “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, the overpraised Ronan Farrow of feminism. Wednesday’s Arts section of The New York Times began with a gushing book review by Michiko Kakutani. The headline was “Hannah’s Self-Aware Alter Ego.” The first line was “Smart, funny women writers love to dispense advice.”
 

Really? NYT Front Page: Terrorist's Tweets Suggest 'Holden Caulfield-l

Clay Waters
April 24th, 2013 3:25 PM
In a puzzling choice, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani filed a front-page "news analysis" knitting together the social media patterns of the terrorist brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon: "Unraveling Brothers' Online Lives, Link by Link -- Connecting Dots, From Banal and Funny to Darkly Ominous." Besides the paper's usual off-putting tone suggesting the terrorist brothers were…
 

Say Again? NY Times Book Critic Faults Fox News for Political Slant

Clay Waters
March 20th, 2013 2:32 PM
Pot, kettle: New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani reviewed Tuesday a new biography by Zev Chafets of Fox News president Roger Ailes under the headline, "A Soft-Focus Look at Fox's Tough-Talking Tough Guy." Kakutani faulted the book for relying on familiar stories and, of course, for Fox News's conservatie viewpoint: "There is little cogent analysis in these pages about how Fox News…