Reviews for Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

The average rating for Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-09-24 00:00:00 Davin Crooks I found that I like Hitchens best as a literary critic, reviewing really shitty authors like Tom Clancy. But on another note, he needed to cut back on his Latin and French epigrams. I suppose people who graduated Oxbridge in the 60s and 70s knew their Latin and French, but people no longer do. Or even when they do it just seems phony. How many times do we need to hear plus anglais que les anglais? There's also a careless error, one many others in the media also made out of sheer laziness. Hitchens repeats the false canard that it was Al Gore who introduced Willie Horton into the 1988 presidential campaign, during the Democratic primaries. Horton, an African American, was a murderer serving life without the possibility of parole whom Michael Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, had paroled under a weekend furlough program. On his weekend of freedom in 1987, Horton twice raped and violently assaulted a woman. In a primary debate, Gore brought up Dukakis's furlough program, but did not mention Willie Horton - because he had never heard the name. He would not have known to mention it. Gore mentioned that two furloughed prisoners had murdered while out on leave under Dukakis's program. (Willie Horton was not one of them.) It was the George H.W. Bush campaign and its proxies who released the name Willie Horton into the political ether, and made ads about it. Then the right wing media went on a stealth mission to associate Gore with Willie Horton, as a way of claiming that Gore had brought a despicable racist tone into the campaign. Then the nonpartisan lazy media picked up the claim and ran with it (as is their wont! That's why we call them lazy!).

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-14 00:00:00 Stewart Beckingham Hitchen's writing takes center stage here, not so much polemic or political activism. He's an aesthete, dontcha know, and he digs into some of the canonical writers of his lifetime- Oscar Wilde, Gore Vidal, Anthony Powell, Fitzgerald, Wodehouse, on and on. What makes this book valuable is his wit and the gracefullness that he brings to the page. He's retained quite a bit of the British way of elegance and understatement, as well as the cutting critical eye and the droll sense of humor. To read these essays to to be treated to insight after insight and be all the richer for it. The title and the thematic material is secondary- what's more important here is to get the opportunity to let Hitch be Hitch and benefit from his learning his shrewdness and his wit. The way he writes situations and sketches characters is second to none. I'm telling you. Literary skills applied to criticism is more rare than you might think it is. here it's all for the taking....