March 28, 2011 Issue

The best thing in this week’s issue is the color-drenched 1941 photo of Helena Rubinstein, wearing a flame-red dress, dripping with jewels, seated in a sumptuous purple armchair. Unfortunately, the article that accompanies the photo – Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Color of Money” – is a dud. Ostensibly a book review, it’s actually another one of Gladwell’s business morality tales. But in this one, the moral Gladwell teases out of a review of Ruth Brandon’s Ugly Beauty is that “Sometimes beauty is just business.” Thank you, Malcolm, for that illuminating aperçu.

Sometimes baseball is just business, too - most of the time, actually. Which is why I took a pass on reading Ben McGrath’s “King of Walks.” Having absolutely no interest in Spanx, I merely skim-read Alexandra Jacob’s “Smooth Moves.” Then I turned expectantly to Lauren Collins’s “Sole Mate.” I loved Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010). Alas, “Sole Mate” is not nearly as good, and I think I know why. Its subject, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin, does not appear to attract Collins’s admiration the way the paraglider/photographer George Steinmetz does in “Angle of Vision.” There’s nothing in “Sole Mate” that even comes close to matching the inspiration of some of the passages in “Angle of Vision.” This one, for example: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.”

The only other piece in this week’s issue that had potential to be interesting was Evan Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” While it’s gracefully written and contains many absorbing facts about the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast coast last month, it fails to put a human face on the victims. Compare it with Jon Lee Anderson’s gritty “Neighbors’ Keeper” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), a report on conditions in Haiti six days after it was struck by an earthquake. Anderson places Nadia François, who walks miles from her town in a ravine in search of supplies, at the center of his piece. We see the devastation of the landscape and the suffering of the people at ground level, as Anderson follows François’ desperate quest for aid. Osnos, in his piece, doesn’t get close enough to the trauma. And in fairness to him, there was the risk of radiation exposure if he got too close to the disaster zone. Whatever the reason, his piece feels weirdly detached. I think the problem is that Osnos gives us his Tokyo experience, when what we're expecting is a detailed description of life in the cities and villages hit by the tsunami.

Second Thoughts: I’m feeling guilty. I was too hard on Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” The passage in which Osnos and a friend are driving through Tokyo at night and are stopped at a red light “as an aftershock rippled through the car” is amazing.