Osama bin Laden doesn't like George Bush. American liberals, like about 70% of their fellow citizens, don't like President Shrub.  Therefore, America's liberals are in cahoots with bin Laden.  If that syllogism makes sense to you, then you're sure to be persuaded by the latest production of one of Darmouth's most notorious dipshits.

Even as a hate-filled paranoiac rant, the book apparently trips over itself. The author admit that he and his fellow reactionaries have more in common with the intolerant hate-filled mullahs of the Middle East than they do with Joan Baez-listening Chablis-swilling pointy heads who can't even park a car straight, or whatever cheesy invective is number one on the hard right's hit parade (also known as Schlox News) this week.

Uh, if shill reactionary ravers agree that tolerance and diversity are dangerous and should be illegal, and if Osama bin Laden believes that tolerance and diversity is dangerous and should be illegal, doesn't that mean that D'Souza and his fellow reactionary pipsqueaks are really to blame for 9/11?  To D'Souza, and his fellow hatemongers, the logic is irrefutable.

Hardly a man alive can remember when Norman Mailer was regarded as a talented writer. Unfortunately, Norman's one of them. Not content to rest with Harlot's Ghost, the ghost of Provincetown has served up a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler (the hack writer's best friend) and his sexual problems (Schickelgruber's, that is, not Norman's).  No, it's not that der Fuehrer had just one ball, pace the song sung by American soldiers over sixty years ago, one of whom was Norman.

In the hands of a lesser blowhard, the resulting work might be merely unreadable. In Mailer's case though it's a catastrophe. It's the worst thing ever written. Wait a minute, that was Springtime for Hitler, not this book.  The confusion is perhaps understandable.  

Mailer has always had a taste for the louche, not to say the transgressive.  Of course, he can't attain the heights of evil so effortlessly reached by the protagonist of his latest tree-killer. But when it comes to bad behavior and even worse books, Norman has shown time and again that he's always willing to take a stab at it.

Gosh, has it really been only 22 months since Crichton's last appearance on the unreadable list? Guess so. (Click here to slide down the old memory hole.) Last time, our unreadable author was using fiction to argue that global warming was a environmentalist scam. Now it's 2007 and when the only sentient creature who agrees with you is Senator James Imhofe [Well, creature, at least – Ed. ], it's high time to move forward.

Or backward.  This latest tree-pulper returns to a theme that Crichton has used to generate royalties for years: the dangers of genetic engineering for profit. Hell, AMC is still showing Jurassic Park so there must be some audience left for this crap.  

Certainly no one could accuse Crichton of a foolish consistency.  After all, for a guy who said such nasty things about environmentalists, he sure likes to recycle. Or perhaps given what he's got, maybe compost would be a better word for it.

This book hasn't stirred up the controversy of his last, but it hasn't stirred up the sales either.  Perhaps Crichton, like other rich reactionaries with oceanfront property who don't believe that global warming will cause ocean levels to rise, is – dare we say it? – all wet. [That's enough – Ed.]