Top Book Critic Loves Gore's "Fiercely Argued" Anti-Bush Screed
Michiko Kakutani's fan mail: Gore's powerful book "The Assault on Reason" just as great as "An Inconvenient Truth."
Posted by:
Clay Waters
5/22/2007 1:47:41 PM
Liberal book critic Michiko Kakutani's review of the eco-activist (and former veep's) newest screed against Bush, "The Assault on Reason," lead Tuesday's Arts section. You can tell Kakutani liked the book because, as is her habit in such circumstances, instead of actually critiquing it, she simply pulls out chunks and strings them together into paragraphs.
"In 'The Assault on Reason' Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is 'out of touch with reality,' that his administration is so incompetent that it 'can’t manage its own way out of a horse show,' that it ignored 'clear warnings' about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by 'stirring up a hornets’ nest in Iraq,' while using 'the language and politics of fear' to try to 'drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest.'"
But don't think that Gore's book is some kind of hyper-partisan hit piece, like the kind those nasty neocons write. (Back in January 2004, Kakutani described "An End to Evil" by conservative hawks David Frum and Richard Perle as having "all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids…smug, shrill and deliberately provocative.")
Far from it: "And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, 'The Assault on Reason' turns out to be less a partisan, election-cycle harangue than a fiercely argued brief about the current Bush White House that is grounded in copiously footnoted citations from newspaper articles, Congressional testimony and commission reports -- a brief that is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this administration’s policies as the author’s 2006 book, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' was in making its points about the fallout of global warming."
As good as "An Inconvenient Truth"? Truly a Times' stamp of approval.
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