The book review is, regrettably, a vanishing literary format, as many newspapers (including the Chicago Tribune) have dropped their book sections. The long-form essay review is yet more endangered, even in academia; witness the passing of The New Rambler Review. Fortunately, we still have the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review, along with the Los Angeles Review of Books and a few other holdouts -- for which we bibliophiles should be grateful.
And we should be still more grateful when we come across a book review so well written that it can stand on its own literary merit. Such is the case with Emily Cooke's review, in Sunday's Times, of Stephanie Land's MAID: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Cooke's review accomplishes its basic goals: describing Land's book and explaining why it is worth reading. But beyond that, Cooke's writing itself is exemplary. Here is an example:
Rent plus groceries plus utilities plus laundry plus insurance plus gas plus clothing minus an hourly paycheck of barely more than minimum wage and the scant assistance parceled out by the government with spectacular reluctance — the brute poetry of home economics recurs throughout Land’s book. When Land is faced with any kind of irregular expense, she must check the budget pinned to her wall, next to her notes about when each bill will be withdrawn and for how much. Math like this isn’t complicated, it’s merely endless. Calculated and recalculated as if the sums will improve with repetition, the figures overwhelm the mind.
"The brute poetry of home economics" is an image that I will not soon forget.
You can read the entire review here.
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