It is hard not to be delighted by Matt Taibbi's very dishy review of some book by a fellow named Friedman, who is apparently a columnist at the New York Times. A favorite passage:
"Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.
And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman's book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author's metaphors."
But there is a lot more. I have no intention of reading the book in question, but it would seem that there is one.
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1 comment:
Dude, you read the *Press*?? I always thought that was my own little guilty secret pleasure.
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