Volume 53, Number 18 · November 16, 2006
True Confessions
By Diane Johnson
I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
by Nora Ephron
Knopf, 137 pp., $19.95
We might hope that the coincidence on the best-seller lists of Nora Ephron's funny, sisterly collection of essays I Feel Bad About My Neck and Thomas Ricks's Fiasco, a book that explores the mendacity, incompetence, and corruption of the war effort in Iraq, or, this week, Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III on the same subject, implies something encouraging about our national character—our realism and appetite for self-criticism. At least the success of these books reflects, beyond their intrinsic merit, our hunger for candor. Oscar Wilde said something about England being the capital of hypocrisy, but the US, outdoing England in many of the qualities we inherited from it, may have now surpassed it there, so that the rare appearance of truthfulness is gratefully rewarded wherever it should be found. Ephron addresses many commonplace hypocrisies, among them:
Review, 1267 words
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