Graydon Carter book: " tiresome tirade of recycled Bush bashes"???

[papau]

http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-et-book8sep08,1,3721212.story
BOOK REVIEW
A tiresome tirade of recycled Bush bashes
What We've Lost Graydon Carter Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 340 pp., $25
By Marty Kaplan
Special to The Times

Sep 8 2004

If you believe, as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter does, that President Bush heads "one of the most secretive, deceptive, vindictive, unaccountable, reckless, and downright venal administrations in American history," then you'll find in Carter's new book, "What We've Lost," plenty of material supporting that view.

But plenty of current books also do that, from "The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America" by Eric Alterman and Mark Green to offerings from John Dean, Kevin Phillips, Michael Moore and many more. <snip>

Instead, Carter has delivered a term paper. Virtually everything in it has been recycled from some other source. It reads as though he had a platoon of research assistants assemble loose-leaf binders on Bush's record on the environment, education, the economy, the judiciary, the war and so on, but that he himself had neither the time nor inclination to do more than write the barest connective tissue to string the examples together. There is nothing original or interesting that animates this book: no theory of what makes Bush tick, no thesis about why half the country doesn't think he's a disaster, no narrative of how the country has come to this pass.

Nor is even the invective much good; the book consists mainly of pointing. Look at this bad thing Bush did! And this one! And this! The best you can say about it is that the examples are decently organized. There may be plenty of source material here for Kerry-Edwards speechwriters, but shouldn't there be a difference between a bunch of bullet points and a real book? <snip>

Rising to the challenge of the book's title isn't a matter of compiling bullet points about the backgrounds of Bush's political appointees, or of assembling clip files of goofy Bush quotes and outrageous Bush policies. It takes actual thinking, and real writing. It requires some historical understanding of how we got here, and some real feel for the tectonic plates of American life. What journey is America on, and what conflicts are driving us? If we are living a nightmare, as Carter believes, then why do half of us so willingly dream it?

Instead of this, Carter gives us the gift of Googling monkeys, the kind of thing that caffeinated undergraduates churn out on all-nighters. <snip>

[wildflower]

1. Marty Kaplan??

Of Air America?

-wildflower

[papau]

2. I do not know - - but he seems to be a "tough grader" :-)

:-)