Blogs / Cosmic Variance

In the Book Review section of Sunday’s New York Times, Joe Queenan has a withering review of Edward Klein’s The Truth about Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President.

Although I am not one of those people exhorting the former First Lady to run for President, I have always thought the vicious reactions some people have to her to be highly irrational and, in many cases, deeply misogynistic. I was therefore expecting to despise Klein’s book for its content. While, according to the review, it seems that I would be right to do so, Queenan points out that there is at least one other reason that the book is a must-miss – the writing!

It can be quite difficult to find truly scathing reviews in the Book Review. Most reviewers seem compelled to say at least something encouraging about other authors, perhaps as a way of taking out insurance to cover a possible future review of their own work. Queenan shows no such reticence and, as if to add insult to injury, his flaying of Klein is presented in some delightful prose of his own. Here’s one example

Granted, it is a very bad book. Granted, it is a lazy, cut-and-paste recycling of other people’s work. Granted, it relies too much on nasty personal comments about Senator Clinton provided by anonymous sources. Granted, it sleazily intimates that Hillary Clinton is a lying, scheming, smelly, left-leaning lesbian and a non-maternal parent who consorts with lawyers who defend mobbed-up unions and bears a striking character resemblance to both Richard Nixon and Madonna, and who tacitly approved of her husband’s rape of a young woman at a time when Mrs. Clinton may or may not have been bathing, washing her hair or shaving her underarms, while hanging out with short-haired women from the sapphic charnel house Wellesley College. But to suggest, as the talented John Podhoretz did in The New York Post, that this is ”one of the most sordid volumes I have ever waded through” is to raise serious questions about Podhoretz’s sordid wading experiences.

Queenan points out that, although this is not the sleaziest book that he has ever read,

in fairness to the author, reading creepy, cut-and-paste books is my hobby.

The review in its entirety is well worth a read and is full of gems like this.

It’s nice to see a good old pants-round-the-ankles spanking in the Book Review, and it seems clear that Klein deserves it. It’s one thing to pour one’s efforts into politically driven hatred and destruction. But to assault not only your readers’ senses of reason and decency, but also their senses of composition, originality and language with your derivative drivel is just too much. At least we have Joe Queenan to help us salvage a little for the world of words.