you can bitch and moan or you can carry on

Hey, all you politicos: what have you done for the culture lately?

While some people bitch (and bitch again) about the “neocon agenda” of the New York Times Book Review under its editor Sam Tanenhaus:

bitchin’:

Before the first shot in the Iraq War was fired, its intellectual supporters–future Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus (then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair), New Republic editor Peter Beinart and literary editor Leon Wieseltier; and writers Paul Berman, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Joe Klein, George Packer and Jacob Weisberg–struck pre-emptively at many who foresaw reruns of the Vietnam War’s trumped-up pretexts, overkill and quagmires.

bitchin’ again:

If Tanenhaus “balances” his criticisms of Bush this evening yet again with diversionary attacks on liberals and the left, many in his AEI audience will be desperately grateful. They still seem to think that assailing war critics or proponents of national health care will confirm them as guardians of national greatness. But they are giving the nation away because they cannot reconcile their keening for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of capital.

Tanenhaus himself is leading a book club of the erudite over at the NYT blog Reading Room, about the new translation of War and Peace.

It’s marathon season in New York, and I’m delighted to announce that a panel of limber readers (see their bios in the right column) have agreed to join me in going the distance with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 1200-plus pages in the new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which we’ll be reading and discussing during the next four weeks.

Why “War and Peace”? Well, it’s one of the greatest novels ever written — the very greatest, some would say. It is, moreover, almost eerie in its timeliness, with its sweeping detailed narrative of military invasion and occupation (by France of Russia in 1812) set against political and social intrigue in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as experienced by aristocratic families, some of them in decline.

“War and Peace” is not just massive. It is sturdily and delicately structured. The novel divides into four volumes (there is also an epilogue). We’ll cover one volume each week — though the panelists will be encouraged to range freely over the whole of the book, its opulent mix of incidents and characters (who include Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and also to tackle Tolstoy’s profound meditations on history, philosophy, religion and human nature.

Here’s the beginning of Bill Keller’s latest entry:

I reached the final page Tuesday morning on a plane home from Des Moines, after a few days of chasing presidential candidates. Squeezing chapters of Volume IV between campaign events, I found the novel bleeding into my observations of the politicians who would be president. John McCain, with his military breeding and his distaste for sugar-coating unpleasant news, reminded me of a voluble Kutuzov. John Edwards, who has lately amped up his populist fervor (as my colleague Jeff Zeleny recounted in Tuesday’s paper) displays definite Denisov tendencies.

It’s interesting, too, to attend a campaign rally fresh from reading Tolstoy’s disquisition on the impotence of humans before history. A lot of Iowa voters — and certainly all of the candidates — seem convinced that choosing a president is choosing a direction in history, that “genius” moves human life in fathomable ways. I could hear Tolstoy tut-tutting from the press section.