Sarah's got the NYTBR Notable Books list covered (look for her dispatch later today), but here's some scattered thoughts about the current issue:

• Note to John Simon: If you're going to take up part of your review of Richard Schickel's Elia Kazan bio to pick stylistic nits with his language, maybe you shouldn't be generating bilge like "No mere page turner, this is a page devourer" for front-page placement. And when you advise a reader to "take this sentence," it helps if what you quote is actually a sentence, not merely a lengthy predicate. I mean, really: Take some of that time you're not spending on theater reviews anymore and put it into polishing your prose. This is the New York Times Book Review: Bring your A-game! (That said, bully for following the biography's lead by talking about Kazan's work and not simply rehashing the "dutiful American or ratfink?" debate all over again.)

• What's with all the armchair psychoanalysis this weekend? David Lipsky's review of Imperial Grunts turns into a case study of Robert Kaplan: "An aspirational resentment—a writer's sense of how good he could be, if he only got the breaks—seems to have been part of Kaplan's equipment from the start." Then there's Terrence Rafferty on John Banville: "[A]t a certain point you might begin to suspect... that this solemn, shimmery verbal miasma is actually a sly parody of the kind of English novel that receives rapturous notices in The Guardian and The Independent, gets made into a quiet, tasteful film with a Harold Pinter script and wins the Man Booker Prize. As it happens, The Sea did just win the Man Booker Prize, which proves, I guess, that Banville knew what he was doing." Jonathan Rosen's consideration of Harold Bloom's Jesus and Yahweh seems positively restrained by comparison, even though it's clearly (even when viewed secondhand) one of Bloom's most personal works; likewise David Oshinksy on John Hope Franklin's memoir.

• David Halberstam gets two-thirds of page 25 for a review of The Education of a Coach. Then he gets roughly three-fifths of the "Inside the List" column on page 26, plus a headshot, and he's not even on the real list yet, just the extended one. Then Hyperion springs for a full-column ad for The Education of a Coach on page 27. Now, I love Halberstam as much as anybody else in New York media, and don't think for a second I'm not getting this book for my stepdad for Christmas, but come on; there's giving props and then there's looking like the fix is in.

• Oh, look, a back-page cartoon about how mean Dale Peck is! Did Chip McGrath take over the Review again? Because it sure feels like 2003...
  

That said, two entire pages on poetry, most of it in paperback? Very cool. Likewise the joint review of Hattie McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit reviews. And let me repeat that, for all his inelegances, John Simon really does get what makes Schickel's biography of Kazan work (yep, I've read it). On the whole, and if you've followed me here from Beatrice you know I've gone on about this, I really do think although it's still a work in progress, the Review is way better now than it was two years ago. Although I've still probably sealed my doom with them by mentioning the brownies thing...