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Scathing book reviews of 2024

Ho, ho, ho, hope you’ve brought an appetite for destruction, because we’ve got some choice cuts for you this holiday season. Among the books being tarred and feathered in the town squar…

“As a rule, she has existed in the collective imagination not so much as real-life woman, with her own interests and idiosyncrasies, but as a glossy 2-D image, largely known through the mediating scrim of magazine coverage, which has tended to present her as one luxury object among others in her mogul husband’s arsenal … Even after Trump became President, Melania remained an essentially unknowable text. For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang … Oyler is constantly retreating into sarcasm, interrupting herself to remind us of her wry distance from everything she says, squirming in the face of commitment or conviction. One can almost pinpoint the place where the thread attaching author to subject unravels, as he repeats tropes and images, and the generation of new material falls beyond his grasp … García Márquez’s work has survived legions of imitators who have misunderstood magic realism as a stylistic mannerism rather than the means to a sharper, less omniscient reality.

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