Maps and Legends

It's a collection of essays by Michael Chabon, who is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. It contains extended defenses of various types of literature Chabon views as underappreciated (Sherlock Holmes, Comic Books), as well as some interesting memoir-like stuff. Recommended.

A book I plan on reading

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. From the NYT Review:

In a study of one 15-block area near U.C.L.A., cars were logging, on an average day, 3,600 miles in pursuit of a place to park. It’s not only the number of parkers on the roads that slows things down. It’s the way they drive, crawling along, sitting and waiting and engaging in other irritating examples of what one expert calls “parking foreplay.” The answer? Sorry: more expensive street parking to encourage the circling hordes to use pay lots.

I think it's the money...

Contra Tim Noah, I'm pretty sure Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D'Souza are smarter than their books indicate. However, they really are just replicating Ann Coulter's book-selling method. I think Ross Douthat/Reihan Salam, David Brooks, etc. show that contemporary conservatism isn't totally brain-dead. But at the same time, any non-brain dead work was getting immediately slapped with the "Traitor!" label and not selling. So, in order to make a living/supplement their income, they need to be needlessly incidenary.

So, in short, it's all about the money.



However, based on everything I've heard about the two books at hand (I've skimmed through The Enemy at Home, but I couldn't bring myself to read Liberal Fascism), I ultimately agree with Noah's assessment:

1. Yes, these books are more deeply researched than the typical Coulter screed and deserve to be taken seriously.
2. Taken seriously, these books reveal themselves to be nonsensical, overwrought, vile, and quite obviously wrong.