After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction

Journalist and novelist Adler (Speedboat) offers what she considers the best of her essays in this large, bracing volume. She doesn’t shy away from colorful details, such as “Dickensian characters” on the Sunset Strip or “picnics at the front” on the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War, but she is at her best covering “turning points,” from a Black Power march in Mississippi in 1966 to the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. One of her favored methods of criticizing powerful, influential figures is making lists, such as film critic Pauline Kael’s “favorite” (and overused) words, or Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s references, throughout their book The Brethren, to the Supreme Court Justices’ “moods and feelings.” Adler’s opinions are as reasoned as they are relentless. She assails with absolute conviction, as she proves in her rebukes of Kael and Robert Bork, among others. Perhaps the most fascinating piece is a lengthy, sympathetic profile of G. Gordon Liddy during a 1980 book tour. Elsewhere, she produces interesting juxtapositions with essays about the abuse of presidential power in the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky scandals. These selections, united by a persistent theme of the “misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and... the journalist’s role in it,” demonstrate that Adler’s uncompromising insistence on accuracy and accountability is what ultimately makes her writing so incisive. (Apr.)