This article was first published in The eXile on October 4, 2007
Robert McCrum’s biography of P.G. Wodehouse was published in 2004. At the time, I ignored it. I know the formula for these bios. You won’t catch me sanctioning the work of some insidious culture-sucking creep who’s picking over the bones of PGW, the peerless writer, I said to the bookstore clerk, who edged away. But you know how it is. Time passes, resolve weakens.
You find yourself back in the bookstore and everything there looks more or less rotten anyway. (more…)
Summer Reading: Banquo’s Ghosts, by Richard Lowry and Keith Korman, Vanguard Press (2009), 352 pages. You have to feel a little sorry for the two neocons who co-wrote Banquo’s Ghosts. The idea seems simple enough: a Tom Clancy-style thriller about a…
Today I’ll finally keep my promise and tell you about my favorite book on the Horn of Africa. Remember a couple columns back, I promised to tell you about a great book on the Ethiopian/Somali wars? Of course I promised…
First, a public confession: as several readers pointed out, I made a disgraceful error in my article “Frey’s Fall” (eXile #230), when I mis-identified Ralph Wiggum as “Ralph Wiggins.” There is, of course, no “Wiggins” in the Simpsons. There can…
“A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey. Doubleday 2003, $22.95 *** This is the worst thing I’ve ever read. A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. Rehab stories provide a way for pampered…
This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.
