Everything I said last week about how the NYTBR doesn't need to be "timely" in its book review coverage? Well, I wasn't talking about Bob Woodward's State of Denial, which finally gets a one-pager from Franklin Foer six full weeks after Michiko Kakutani delivered her take. Obviously, a book which is in and of itself a news event, as Woodward's book certainly is, deserves more timely coverage...and any delay in that coverage should be compensated for by extraordinarily penetrating insight. Which Foer—who, in all fairness, has enough to keep him busy emailing me about all the great things going on at The New Republic—simply doesn't provide; what he delivers is pretty much what most other major American newspapers, along with the Times, gave their readers last month. (See, for example, Ted Widmer's October 8 WaPo review.)

The fact that Foer was incapable of incorporating what happened to Donald Rumsfeld last week into his long-since-filed report only exacerbates the problem, which is especially notable when it comes to high-profile political books. Cast your mind back to the summer of 2005, for example, when it took the NYTBR forever to review Ed Klein, or the 2004 election cycle, when Unfit for Command was on the Times bestseller lists as early as August 29 but not discussed in the Review until October 10 (at which point it only got half a page). One notable exception: Earlier this year, Walter Isaacson wrote about State of War a month after the daily Times review, but he took that opportunity to reflect on the struggles between the Bush administration and the New York Times about just how much of James Risen's original reporting would make it into the paper and when. If you've got something like that to look forward to, by all means wait out the extra month to get it. Otherwise, it's only a suggestion on my part, but at a certain point one needs to sacrifice the prestige of securing a Franklin Foer or Joe Queenan byline in favor of getting coverage nailed down in a timely manner reflecting the newsworthiness of the material.