Dusty Volumes
maggie and milly and molly and may went down to the beach(to play one day)
This is pretty much just an edited together version of lots of his blog posts (and not even the best ones! Is he saving those for a follow-up?) If I hadn't read them all previously (several times over) I'd likely have loved the book, but I was hoping for something more, so I was rather disappointed by this.
Very disappointing. This is like a blog you'd follow for a while because of its curious conceit, but would gradually realise didn't really offer much beyond the raw idea. At least with a blog you'd maybe get some wonderful fights going on in the comments, but in book format it's just a pub bore pontificating one table over, with whom you can't even get into a good argument. For a much much better version, get 100 different people to answer each of the questions, and then select the most interesting, surprising, or insightful of each. That could be a book worth reading. This one isn't.
I spent most of the last few series of “The Mark Thomas Product” wondering just how far he’s going to have to go before someone actually kills him. This book provokes the same reaction.The cover sums it up better than I can: “Is there really a secret room from which a tiny elite rules the world, and if so, can it be found? THEM: ADVENTURES WITH EXTREMISTS is a romp into the heart of darkness involving twelve-foot lizard-men, PR-savvy Ku Klux Klansmen, Ian Paisley, Hollywood limousines, kidnapped sex slaves, David Icke, and Nicolae Ceausescu’s shoes. While Jon Ronson attempts to locate the secret room, he is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew at a Jihad training camp, and witnesses CEOs and leading politicians undertake a bizarre owl ritual in the forests of northern California.”
I’d read the Ian Paisley section of a few years ago in the ‘Independent’ magazine, so I had a good idea of what to expect, style-wise: dark humour, more from letting the subject of his writing speak for themselves, rather than actually satirising them directly — Louis Theroux style. However, I hadn’t realised how connected the entire book would be: I was expecting a series of similar unrelated tales of encounters with other figures. Instead this book is more of a travelogue as Ronson tries to discover whether or not the Bilderberg Group really rule the world. (The Paisley chapter is actually almost out of place). The story is wonderfully told, although surprisingly sympathetic towards many of the characters.
There was apparently an accompanying Channel 4 series that I really need to see now…
[review backfilled here from 2002 blog post]
Currently reading
Black Swan Green
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Kiss Kiss
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Lost and Found in Russia: Lives in the Post-Soviet Landscape
Confessions of a Public Speaker
Mis on Vabadus
Shades of Grey
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
