Letters to the Editor – The New York Times
DAVID ROSENBERG
MIAMI
The writer is the author of “A Literary Bible” and collaborated with Harold Bloom on “The Book of J.”
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Drawn Into the Middle East
To the Editor:
Janine di Giovanni’s review (Feb. 12) of recent graphic books about the Middle East described the disparate approaches the three books took to portraying the region and touched upon reasons for their varying levels of success; but, remarkably, the reviewer failed to devote a single line to what makes these graphic novels and memoirs graphic — the actual illustrations.
Glen Chapron’s photorealistic artwork gives “The Attack” the air of a gripping motion picture filmed on location in Israel and the West Bank. The cartoonish drawings in Riad Sattouf’s “Arab of the Future 2” are an appropriate way to depict the tribulations of the 6-year-old protagonist. And Sarah Glidden’s simple watercolor illustrations for “Rolling Blackouts” effectively convey the hard work and painstaking process of international journalism.
It’s nice that graphic novels and nonfiction are approaching parity with prose books in the review media. But a book reviewer who ignores the visual aspect of this format is no better than a film reviewer who keeps her eyes shut during a screening.
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GORDON FLAGG
PORTLAND, ORE.
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Lincoln and the Border States
To the Editor:
Alice Kessler-Harris’s review of Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s “Six Encounters With Lincoln” (Feb. 12), referring to the loyal border states where slavery was legal, claims that “to ensure their commitment to the Union, Lincoln simply turned a blind eye, dashing the democratic aspirations of thousands of enslaved people.”
Lincoln’s posture on combating slavery — and bringing about its eventual extinction — was far more nuanced than turning a blind eye. One example: On March 10, 1862, Lincoln met with a group of representatives from the four border slave states (Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky and Delaware) to encourage them to accept his plan for gradual, compensated emancipation.
On July 12, 1862, Lincoln invited 29 border-state representatives to the White House to press his emancipation plan, telling them, “I do not speak of emancipation at once, but a decision at once to emancipate gradually.” Two days later the president proposed to draft a bill “to compensate any State which may abolish slavery within its limits.” The representatives rejected the offer. Lincoln then began thinking, perhaps more earnestly, about another, broader strategy — and later that year introduced the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on Jan. 1, 1863.
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CHARLES W. MITCHELL
PARKTON, MD.
The writer is the editor of “Maryland Voices of the Civil War.”
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Perusing the Book Review
To the Editor:
In Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Here I Am,” the character Sam Bloch observes that “perused” is “a word that means the exact opposite of what most people think it means.” After reading that, I looked up the definition of “perused,” and discovered that I was among “most people.”
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Apparently, so is James Atlas. In “Headed for the Graveyard of Books” (Author’s Note, Feb. 12), he determines that the books in the Shelburne Farms library “look as if they’ve been perused if not exactly read.”
MICHAEL OSTROFF
PASADENA, CALIF.
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