Remember those ruts I talked about, way back when? Those tiresome reading ruts I tend to get stuck in? We're not out of it, yet--Kingsley Amis was an aberration, not the beginning of a new rut (darkly humorous postwar British lit?), as my immediately deciding to read Clinton-administration adviser Matt Miller's The Tyranny of Dead Ideas more than adequately indicates (there's a subtitle about unleashing a new era of prosperity or something along those lines, but I don't have the book here with me and can't recall exactly what it said). Anyway, enough about me, let's talk about the book. It was definitely OK, but I won't give it any more than that. It was a quick read, an interesting read, the sort of economics/current affairs reading I like to do right about now, but it wasn't anything groundbreaking and it wasn't anything particularly well-written. It was the right book for the moment, for me, without its being the right book for me or anybody else in any other sense. Which sounds extraordinarily harsh, but let me (try to) explain. I'm not going to recommend this book to you here, because I can't really, because there are so many other, better books like this out there. But at the same time, I am going to recommend it to you if you're looking for a book like this and have read a lot of those others, because in that way it's kind of interesting. So I'm going to give this book a C+, whereas this entry gets an F for totally sucking. I mean honestly, it's probably the worst I've written yet, and I've reviewed comic books, for chrissakes. Let's just move on, please!
P.S.-The picture attached to this entry actually comes from Mr. Miller's own website, suggesting that he really likes the way his book looks when it's slightly angled. I found this to be at least as interesting as anything it contained, and it made me like him a lot more.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment