I know what book I'm buying next -- Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank's book "Tears of a Clown" -- a bio of Glenn Beck. I just read an excerpt at Daily Beast.
Dana is one of the funniest writers in the press, and a former colleague of mine in the WSJ's Boston bureau. Beck doesn't deserve treatment by such a talent, but this book looks like a lighthearted romp across Beck's bizarre body of opinion.
Wonderful money quote from Dana: "Beck can do this because he is not constrained by the fact/fiction divide that governs the rest of the news business. "
Dana goes on: "Beck calls his unique hybrid of fact and fiction “faction.” “Faction,” Beck explained, is a “completely fictional” account that somehow still has a plot “rooted in fact.” That is what Beck wrote in the foreword to his thriller, The Overton Window, which came out in mid-June. After providing a “fictional” account of world government taking over America, he offered a 30-page afterword full of citations of “factual” events that supposedly support the fictional story."
"Tears of a Clown" be a good read, but I suspect it won't become a best-seller on the strength of a Glenn Beck plug.
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