All You Direct - Book Reviews

By Eric Clapton

“It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth, that’s why they’re songs,” Eric Clapton writes of “Tears in Heaven,” the wrenching song he wrote in the aftermath of the freak death of his young son, Conor, in 1991.

Yes, it is difficult, Mr. Clapton. But as you sit pecking on your computer with one finger “like a demented chicken,” as you say, let’s remember that you have a book to write here — “Clapton: The Autobiography,” released last week — and the occasion calls for, um, writing: serious introspection, context, scene setting, an acknowledgement that one has lived an extraordinary life, the hum and throb of real human emotion.

Unfortunately, Clapton, ever the ambivalent frontman, can’t or won’t offer that up in “Clapton” and for that, the book joins a vast and deep collection of unsatisfying rock tell-alls. The problem isn’t that he doesn’t bring his best stuff to the table.

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By Donald Dewey

Since the time of the American Revolution, a rowdy band of hangers-on has lurked along the fringes of the nation’s political life, convinced they are unmasking the outrageous, lampooning the ridiculous and puncturing the pompous.

They are political cartoonists, whose lambastes of public affairs and public officials have metamorphosed through more than two centuries of communications technology from the woodcut to the Web.

Over those years, they have poured millions of drawings into the daily give-and-take of politics, even though they themselves have never had a secure sense of the real role they play in that process: Do their cartoons really shape public opinion and policies, or do they merely provide an evanescent garnish to the onrushing tide of events?

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