Some of us have shaken our head at the usual New York Times reaction to a Mark Levin best-seller. It tops their best-seller list without the Times ever reviewing it. This has held for the new book Plunder and Deceit, now at number 2 on their chart this Sunday. But it was hilarious/appalling to see the quality of tomes they’re reviewing instead.
In Sunday’s Times Book Review, it was....the book Selfish by Kim Kardashian West. It’s a picture book of her own selfies. Towering intellects are not required to secure a book review.
Reviewer Caitlin Flanagan combined the Famous Glutes book with two tomes on narcissism, but the subject is still celebrity obsession:
As a physical object, the book is surprisingly elegant: a compact white bible[?], a thing beckoning to be held..... Kardashian wants us to know that she is leading a beautiful life, that it is peopled by beautiful friends, all of whom reflect or enhance her own beauty, but the question for you and me is: Are we in any kind of danger here? Is Kardashian a threat to us? Or should we look to her, instead, as exemplar, as someone with much to teach us about mastering our own selfish lives?
Naturally, Kim is in no way a figure in feminism, only narcissism:
This is not granny-panty feminism; it’s shopgirl feminism. What she’s selling isn’t the dream of a Sarah Lawrence degree, a bold venture into a sustainability-related career and eventual — messy, human, rewarding — co-parenting. She’s selling the idea that any young woman scanning bar codes at Kmart can vault out of that condition not by night school and thrift but by texting enough naked selfies and staging enough tear-filled mini-dramas that she gets discovered and ends up with her own McMansion and a diamond as big as the Ritz. Could Kim Kardashian have created and capitalized upon this improbable vision if she had worked at achieving Craig Malkin’s sweet spot of “just enough” narcissism? Would she be the woman she is today if she had taken Joseph Burgo’s advice and severed ties to her narcissistic mother?
There’s nothing cynical about Kardashian’s enterprise. What fuels everything — every product and episode and personal appearance — is the honestly held and unshakable conviction that she is special and better and more interesting than anyone else around her. That a trio of spray-tanned shoppers managed to transform themselves into the Mitford sisters of the San Fernando Valley is entirely because of Kim Kardashian — the only Kardashian most of us can reliably recognize — and her fathomless ego.
At least Levin did appear in the Sunday Times, in a front-pager on the post-Boehner power struggle:
Before the news of Mr. Boehner's decision had even sunk in, conservative knives were out for the heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader.
Mark Levin, the conservative talk show host, called Mr. McCarthy ''Eric Cantor with 10 less I.Q. points,'' a reference to the last House majority leader, who lost his seat to a Tea Party insurgent in 2014.
