David Remnick

A raft of new books take on Obama, both inside and out

The New Yorker editor must have cursed the way his magazine’s publication schedule popped out a double issue during the busiest two weeks in the summer. So he’s had to watch, a little helpless, for two weeks while Solzhenitsyn died and Russia launched its first shooting war on foreign soil in decades. This has been more than a busy couple of weeks to David Remnick, who was a great Moscow bureau reporter for the Washington Post and whose book Lenin’s Tomb is one of the definitive chronicles of the Soviet Union’s collapse. I have been waiting to see what he would make of all this. His column is now up on his magazine’s website. It has been worth the wait.

The New Yorker‘s redoubtable editor has clearly been unsure how to respond to the death of Whitney Balliett, who was the magazine’s jazz writer for half a century. David Remnick has had Stanley Crouch write at least one piece, a magisterial profile of Sonny Rollins, and Gary Giddins has written a few more, including a less persuasive profile of Ornette Coleman a few weeks ago. But Remnick hasn’t chosen a full-time jazz writer and lately he’s written a few pieces on the topic himself, including a brief profile of The Bad Plus whose central victory was that, like the band itself, he didn’t take them too seriously.