Joe Queenan
I hope Joe feels better after passing that.
This is news?
Queenan thinks he's writing ironically, but it makes a lot more sense if you read it straight. Hillary is sleazy, or worse, and Klein captures her accurately. For people like Hillary, the truth is inevitably a smear.
"Mrs. Clinton herself has long battled a tendency to beef up, but in perhaps the most astonishing revelation in the book, ''several of her Wellesley College classmates, who played sports with Hillary, described how she looked in a T-shirt and shorts,'' and according to them, ''she had a tiny waist, slim legs and ankles, and small buttocks.'' "
The reviewer writes a patently dishonest review taking things out of their context to attempt to make Klein's book look ludicrious. While Klein's book may not be the greatest piece of prose ever written and indeed has certain sleazy aspects to it, there are many aspects of the book that make it an interesting read--and an important cautionary tale about a terribly damaged and an emotionally unhealthy person who wants to become president.
However the hatchet job done by this New York Slimes review doesn't even attempt to deal with the book on its merits or in anything but a smarmy and sarcastic fashion. I could take that if it wasn't for the deliberate dishonesty and misrepresentation of the contents by the reviewer. The above situation about observations regarding Hillary's figure while at Wellsley is but one example. Klein makes mention of the above not to say as this New York Slimes reviewer claims that Hillary is pandering to fat people. Klein never intimates any such thing. And if this Slimes reviewer honestly came away with that interpretation, then he's a terribly intellectually-stunted person.
Klein mentions the above about Hillary's college physique in discussing that she may be suffering from a disease that has caused her to gain weight in her lower extremities, the exact name of which escapes me at the moment. This is not a central focus of Klein's book nor a foremost revelation in it. Indeed it consumes one short paragraph.
That this idiot Clinton shill reviewer chooses to focus on that to the exclusion of more pertinent and damaging revelations, and does so out of context, shows his intellectual dishonesty. I notice he ignores the more weighty charges against Hillary in this book to focus on what he can make look the most petty and irrelevent, even if it happens to take up less than a paragraph of the book.
I wonder if this same Slimes reviewer showed so much incredulity about Kitty Kelly's slander piece on the Bush family. I'm guessing not.
I liked "The Postman". Other than that I don't know what else this writer is saying because I don't feel like going through the trouble of registering or going to bugmenot.com just to read a Slimes article.
This is an Amazon review of the book Joe Queenan wrote:
When I first read Joe Queenan, I thought he was about the funniest writer on the planet. He is still very funny and very talented, but his shtick can get just a bit old, and fast.
This book started as an article, and if you can, I would track that article down and save yourself the money and the time it takes to read this very slim yet somehow plodding hatchet job on anything popular for Middle America.
This subject was stinging and hilarious as an article, running the perfect length and not overstaying its venomous welcome.
But as the book drags on, Queenan is so relentless with his targets that the reader feels a backlash coming. Sometimes it seems like the mere mention of "Tony Orlando" or "Phil Collins" is supposed to be enough to make you laugh and understand how disgruntled Queenan is. And simply the word "suck" is used and used again to describe everything Queenan doesn't like. Okay, Joe, we get it. It's a bit tired to read page after page of insulting "middle American huckleberries", etc. I guess if people are not as fortunate, intelligent, or rich as Queenan, they're more or less despicable cretins to be mocked by the admitted "cultural effete".
Another problem is that many of Queenan's references are either already outdated or beyond obvious. The entertainment industry does the job for him when cheap targets like Steve Guttenberg or Joe Piscopo are chewed up and spit out by the industry itself once it has no use for them. The vast majority of figures like this really do wind up just going away, and why? Because the audiences--the middle Americans Queenan loves ripping to make himself sound smarter--disgard their product. Queenan's biggest problem is with crap that poses as art, and he even admits that certain cheese is not so bad, as long as it's aware that it's cheese (as he discovers that Manilow is a good entertainer, if a cheeseball). However, I did find it a bit nauseating when our intrepid author, who has immersed himself in popular culture and become addicted, needs to take a trip to France to cleanse himself and rediscover real beauty and culture. Can you say vomit?
So let me understand this: the truth about the Commodities Scam Queen should only be told once, and in one way; while the lies should be recycled day after day and week after week. Did anyone suggest that it was a "twice-told tale" when some acolyte wrote about her (faux) compassion for the children and the downtrodden?
ML/NJ
The last time I saw a review this obscenely opposed to it's subject, was when "The Passion" came out.
