I’m not exactly sure how to deal with this:
Posted Sunday on a general-interest news and blog site was an excerpt from an about-to-be-published book ostensibly dealing with a serious subject that I frequently blog about. But the only subject that this long excerpt concerns itself with is the allegedly lurid side of personal lives (in the past, if not the present) at a major American art museum.
I don’t want to give publicity to the book and I don’t want to give publicity to the blog. But I do want to say that if this book (which you are sure to hear about, if you haven’t already) does have any serious merit, it fatally sabotages itself with this tabloid sensationalism. I did like the one comment posted by a reader of the blog: “He shagged. She shagged. Yawn.”
The enabler of this dirty journalism is Times Books, the publishing partnership between the NY Times and Henry Holt And Company. The publisher’s website boasts that the Times is “the recipient of 95 Pulitzer Prizes.”
Not for work of this quality.