TV REVIEW : ‘Bookmark’: Talk Is All That Matters

Television is consumed with talk, much of it as vaporous as cocktail chatter, little of it having to do with books and ideas. “The Tonight Show” once had what it called the author spot. It was frequently crowded out and finally dropped altogether.

A small, valiant outpost of network attention to books and authors, “Bookmark,” hosted by Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine, returns for a second series on KCET Channel 28 (where else?) on Sunday morning at 10:30 (when else?).

It is classic, early public television, e.g.: heads talking, around a table. All that matters is the talk. On “Bookmark,” as Lapham has explained, the intention is not to review books but to discuss their contents with the author and one guest, who may or may not take an adversarial stance (but should).

On Sunday’s premiere, the subject is Richard Nixon, the author Stephen Ambrose, whose “Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician 1962-72” is the second volume of an intended trilogy. The outspokenly anti-Nixon guest is political economist Walter Russell Mead.

There is at least some comfort for Nixon admirers. Ambrose, who describes himself as a lifelong liberal Democrat, admits that the more he researched, the more he came to a grudging admiration of Nixon in foreign policy. But that is about as extensive as the admiration gets.

“Except for maybe Pat Buchanan, he’s the most devoted hater in American public life,” Mead says in his gadfly role.

“Oh, I think he would beat Buchanan,” Ambrose responds. “There’s a viciousness to Richard Nixon that has no depths to it, that has no limit to it.”

It makes for a lively half-hour, capable of getting pulses to pounding on both sides of the Nixon fence.

On the second show, airing Feb. 11, author Tom Wolfe defends his thesis, first published by Lapham in Harper’s in an article called “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” that the contemporary American novel suffers from pernicious anemia and timidity. What is required, Wolfe says, is a battalion of angry Emile Zolas.

The disloyal opposition consists of novelist Mary Gordon (“The Other Side”) and Charles Simmons, deputy editor of the New York Times Book Review. Gordon emotionally calls Wolfe’s article “the most self-aggrandizing literary piece I’ve seen in a good long time.” But Wolfe emerges rather disappointingly unscathed.

On the third show (Feb. 18) Studs Turkel and Paul Fussell discuss World War II. What the program needs, and which Turkel provided in a discussion with E. L. Doctorow last season, is a mite less sedateness. A little civility goes a long way.