May 22, 2007

Dept of Soon To Be Remaindered Books

This comes courtesy of the redoubtable Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO:

Mary Matalin’s Threshold imprint [of Simon & Schuster] looks to be really taking off. How can you not be excited by the upcoming John Bolton Surrender Is Not An Option (Amen!)? She’s also got a Lynne Cheney autobiography (our next First Lady!), What’s the Matter with California?, and a book by the Duke lacrosse coach — subtitled: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case and the Lives It Shattered.

K-Lo suggests that, "One can’t help to be glad that she’s in the book business".

Quite. How could one not be excited by this compelling illustration of the depth and vigour of contemporary conservative debate?

But is it unbearably snobbish or sniffy to note that, whatever one's own literary credentials, it requires considerable generosity of spirit to grant any of these volumes the title "book" in anything other than the meanest, lowest, technical sense of the term?

UPDATE: I notice that Messrs Douthat and Larison have also toiled in these fields.

22 May 2007 21:24:41 | Books, GOP, O Tempora, O Mores

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