To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence. I remember having lunch with him in a ratty ethnic dive off Times Square in early 2000, when he explained that, what with one thing and another, he’d somehow drifted out of the practice of reviewing books. That happens to many a fine critic; take time off to write your own book or to work some other beat, and eventually you migrate to the inactive section of book review editors’ rolodexes. It bothered him.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers John Leonard.

Salon has James Hannaham’s review of Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines.

Sol, an arrogant boy from California, is convinced he is some sort of messiah. Huston draws him with biting specificity and detail, in the process nailing the dark side of American narcissism and child worship. She has a fast-paced style, as breathless as Philip Roth’s, deceptively light though deeply engaged in current events. Sol’s parents have childproofed the house by covering the electrical sockets and putting soft corners on all the furniture, but as soon as Sol is alone, he enthusiastically seeks out images of pornography and torture on the Internet. Huston spares us neither the outrageous vulgarity of the hypocritical environment in which Sol’s parents raise him nor its appalling effect on his personality.

Writing for Salon, Edward McClelland covers David Foster Wallace’s McCain’s Promise, Cliff Schecter’s The Real McCain, Paul Begala’s Third Term, and Matt Welch’s The Myth of a Maverick.

When scholars of the Obama presidency try to answer the question “Who Was John McCain?” — or, more pointedly, “Who Were the Two John McCains?” — they should start by reading what journalists had to say about him. Four new books about McCain, by four liberal authors, show how difficult it’s been for a politician with middle-of-the-road instincts to operate in a polarized era. Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.

At Salon Laura Miller remembers David Foster Wallace.

“Last December. . .a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” The speaker is Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, and the wife is Rema, an Argentine considerably younger than her husband. Confronted with this ingenious impostor (she’s so good he briefly contemplates the possibility that one of her feet might really be his wife’s), Leo is initially nonplused. Soon, however, he formulates a plan: find the real Rema.

Laura Miller at Salon reviews Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances.

At Salon Rebecca Johnson goes in search of blurbs.

Surely no boy of 9 could ever conceive of artfully juxtaposing an account of Nero’s oft-frustrated attempts to assassinate his mother with the boy’s own disillusionment upon discovering his mum canoodling with one of their married hosts?

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Matthew Kneale’s When We Were Romans.

Laura Miller at Salon probes Barack Obama’s reading history.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he’d given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

. . .Rebecca’s article is too sad to bear, and although I, too, have written about my troubled relationship with my mother, I did not have the heart to do so in a major way while she was alive. I waited until after her death to do so — and still I feared that I was both committing a sin and tempting fate. Exposing your mother’s nakedness in public, breaking publicly with the only woman who ever gave birth to you, is a tabooed, ungrateful, desperate, perhaps dangerous and always complicated act.

Phyllis Chesler, writing for Salon, covers the split between Alice Walker and her daughter, Rebecca Walker.

In “Who Killed the Literary Critic?” at Salon Louis Bayard and Laura Miller, spurred by Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (I noted the TLS’s review in March), discuss the future of literary criticism.

Or perhaps, also like me, my uncle hoped that if one day he did manage to read Needham’s epic from start to finish, he would learn the answer to the famous “Needham question”: How did it come to pass that a civilization with such an astounding history of inventiveness and scholarship and intellectual curiosity failed to make the leap into the modern world of science? Where did China go wrong? Why did the industrial revolution take off in Europe, and not China?

Writing for Salon, Andrew Leonard reviews Simon Winchester’s biography of Joseph Needham, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. Winchester (or his publisher) certainly should have stopped directly before the colon.

At Salon Gary Kamiya reviews Gerard DeGroot’s The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade.

The writers at Salon present a round-up of new books on the war in Iraq.

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter.

At Salon, Stephen Marche writes of the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Laura Miller at Salon covers Maya Angelou’s poem of tribute to Hillary Clinton and Toni Morrison’s letter of endorsement to Barack Obama.

Salon’s end-of-year picks usually are, to my taste, the best around. This year’s selections are peculiarly uninspired.

Salon’s Literary Guide to the World has an entry on Washington, D. C.

At Salon Jonathon Keats reviews Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer.

Salon has a lukewarm review of Nathan McCall’s Them.

Salon is running an interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein that fairly crackles with tonic intellectual rigor.

Salon has an interview with Jonathan Kozol, author of Letters to a Young Teacher.

Salon has a delightful interview with the steely Dr. Taner Edis, author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam.

In an opinion piece at Salon, Gary Kamiya avers that editors are even more important in the Internet age than they were when print ruled the land.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

Salon is running a review of Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual.

At Salon, Astra Taylor reviews Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.

The book apparently features numerous examples of painful compromise that will be familiar to area readers, such as the story of Brendan, “a former lawyer at the progressive Center for the Study of Responsive Law, who switched career tracks for the bigger paycheck needed to buy a house within commuting distance of D.C.”

Salon is running a review by Alexander Nazaryan of A Russian Diary, the posthumously published record of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Anyone curious about why Russia’s post-Soviet flirtation with democracy has been such an erratic affair will find [the book] an indispensable tome. A reporter for Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper), one of Russia’s last organs of liberal media, Politkovskaya gained prominence–and notoriety–by chronicling the gradual depredation of civil liberties that began when Putin took power in 1999 and reopened the Chechen conflict that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had waged to keep the small mountain region from gaining autonomy.

Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment last fall with several point-blank shots that, as any Russian knows, signal a contract killing.

In a Salon interview Jonathan Lethem, author of You Don’t Love Me Yet, wails against copyright law and celebrates appropriation.

Salon has an article by Tom Lutz on authors who want readers to stop reading in the academic mode.

Francine Prose, for instance. In her latest book, “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them,” Prose rails against the FemiMarxiDecons in English departments that are destroying literature and everything holy.

A Salon reader asks:

The thought of publishing the novel terrifies me. However, I do long to be published. I would not be happy just writing for the sake of writing. I want to write to be heard. It’s just that I’m afraid of being heard, as much as I want it.

. . .Have any suggestions?

Salon answers.

Salon has a review of Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y.

Salon has a best-of list twist: some of their favorite authors weigh in on the best books of 2006. The list so handily transcends the meme that it should be in a separate category entirely.