--Michiko Kakutani years ago panned John L'Heureux's book Comedians. I went right out and bought and loved it. Her bad review made the book sound fascinating, and it was.

--I gave Richard Ford's A Mutltitude of Sins a mixed review, but we don't travel in the same circles, so I guess I'm lucky.

--The wife of a writer friend stopped him from firing off a protest to a reviewer by saying, "Do you want to be acknowledged for your craft or known as a maniac?"

--Any author feeling the urge to savage a critic should read Bech at Bay where Updike's hero goes after some of his reviewers. Sweet catharsis.

--Pope said this about reviewers: "Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss"

It's great to see Salon review a book that hasn't been published by one of the big trade houses. Can more indie/university press titles be next? As a reader, reviewer, and author, I hope so.

Joan, it's not a slow-motion crackup. He's doing what many people do who have been profoundly humiliated: he's bathing in shame, even drowning in it, as an unconscious way to free himself of it (check out this book http://tiny.cc/MrCWi). As an unconscious strategy, it's paradoxical and painful, and sadly for all of us, he seems to think it's the only way through the morass.

Hmmm, if this is an example of great dialogue or a great moment, then the movie is likely to be even worse than I suspected, and worse than the review makes it sound:

He informs his men that he wants, "100 Gnatzi scalps!" After a pause, he adds, "And I want my scalps!" After one last beat comes the capper: "Or you will die tryin'!"

"the Obama camp does play up the cult of personality a bit (....The Classical columns in Denver?)"

If his image had been emblazoned on all of the columns, or on each piece of confetti, or on every seat back in the stadium, maybe.

But Greco-Roman iconography is part and parcel of our public life, our architecture, our government. The columns said stately, said presidential, said serious. It was totally appropriate and not remotely Maoist, Titoist or Stalinist. This cult of personality accusation is bunk.

When reviewers throw in a mention of Henry James, it's usually slightingly, and I always wonder if they've bothered to read him.

"Whites turn against Obama because of race" makes for great headlines, but my sinking opinion of the President has nothing to do with race. I was unhappy he had so many Wall Street types in his economic team, but more importantly, he's backtracked on campaign promises about privacy, about gay rights, and about the wars. That's all deeply disappointing, as is the mantra: "We're not looking back, we're looking forward" whenever Bush administration torture tactics come up. That's the GOP's phrase he's using, and it's painful to hear.

Hardly. Try reading Robert Ludlum, Steve Martini, or David Baldacci who described a seated fat man leaning back: "His bulk extrapolated outward until it engulfed the chair." Whatever Brown's faults, he writes better than that.

What's sad is that once again, Dan Brown will suck all the air out of the room. Everyone will waste time reviewing it or doing something perhaps more elevated: writing about him as a cultural phenomenon. I'm reminded of a big city book editor who told me she quit her newspaper because she was tired of being pushed to do yet another feature on Stephen King.

I respect Laura Miller as a reviewer, which is why when I had my own public radio book show she was one of the first people I interviewed. That makes it harder to understand why, as so many people here have mentioned, Salon needed to do a review of the new Dan Brown book at all.

Miller has the range and perceptiveness to have talked about larger questions like what the state of publishing is when it relies on megabooks like this one, or even why reviewers waste so much time reviewing books like this one that don't need reviews but sell themselves through ad campaigns on-line and off, through massive presence in book stores displays, and through cultural blather.

Writing a review that elaborates the faults of Dan Brown's book is just too easy, too limited, and clearly too tempting.

Yet another silly piece about Jennifer Aniston? And yesterday we get an endless take on Dan Brown's new book?

Salon should be offering cultural reviews and commentary further off the beaten track, not covering the same crap everyone else does.

His Open Letter to George Bush in the current Atlantic about torture and the Iraq War is a masterpiece of myopia, painful to read in the ways he makes excuses for Bush and for the war.

SZ: I'm seeing "2012" tomorrow and fully expect that last speech you hoped would be better to be just as empty and weak as the President's awful, flat-footed speech in "Independence Day" which could have been written by almost anyone, and apparently was. But movies like this are all about FX.