I'm a conflicted about this book, which is why it's taken me two months to get around to writing a review. Let's get the dollars and cents out of the way first. I paid one hundred twenty-eight dollars for this book. Sad to say, that's not even close to my personal record for expensive wood pulp and ink. But at least the other books in that range were textbooks.

That's not really a fair criticism though, because I bought HMJCtW in Hong Kong Dollars, so it really cost about eighteen bucks in American currency. Sloppy thinking like that suffuses this book.

Francis Wheen is a columnist at the The Guardian, Britain's most profitable left-wing newspaper, which should have been a clue about what I was getting into. For every reasonable screen about how UFO believers are idiots, there was another chapter about how only idiots could believe that a free market could efficiently distribute goods and services. He spends a chapter bewailing Margaret Thatcher and her distruction of the British coal miner's union. He also spends a chapter on post-modernism in literary criticism (see the Sokal Affair), but his half of his objections to the "po-mos" is that they supplanted Marxist literary criticism as the academic vogue; and Marxist criticism is just as irrational as the po-mos.

Lastly, the books was heavily cover-blurbed as being hilariously funny. Maybe this is one of those "English humor" things that this poor colonial doesn't follow, but this book is rather profoundly unfunny. Reading it was like getting stuck at a dinner party next to an aging hippy that made a bundle in the stock market and is now ethically confused but bitter and unwilling to shut up.

I didn't learn a damn thing from this book, except that writers all-fired up to expose idiocy may, in fact, be idiots themselves.

Posted by: Boviate at 12:53 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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