Whitaker: The Mapmaker's Wife / Mad in America

Google rec.arts.books for either title, or the author and wouldn't you
know? Zilch. Totally. Yet here's the highly favorable NY Times
review . . .

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501EFDB1F3CF930A15756C...629C8B6

Okay? You want advice on a good book to read that is not just some
slick pop pulp slop from the 'best seller' hype machine, but something
really hip? Dig it: you don't come here, you come to--well, let us
say, the sort of person that would know about Robert Whitaker.

But what you got here? A collegially conceited clique of ever so
serious minded dilettantes whose knowledge of literature is mostly
informed of like, you know--this month's default selection from the
Book of the Month Club?

Right. But it's not entirely their fault, the poor souls, because they
are this small, but grossly comical coterie of square-hatted
academics, walking quite blindly out here through the forest of truly
with-it literature which they cannot see, for the tassel of their own
narrow discipline dangling before their noses.

Sad it is for this silly lot of collegially serious squares we got out
there; they really are bourgeois bird-brains of a feather, because dig
how limited in purview they must forever be--for the necessity of
keeping up to snuff with the publications of peers in their own
specialized fields? Oh, the pathos of it.

Yes, and by the time they get round to looking for the last thing they
saw was #1 on the best seller list,, e.g. Harry Potter, that silly
damned thing has already gone so far off the shelves at Barnes and
Noble as to have become part of a contemporary canon of "great books"
over in the department of English Lit.

Oh indeed, and you do not want to go nosing through that dusty old
mausoleum of print, because the last thing good to read is anything
being kept in smelly formaldehyde of scholarly consensus, like some
rack of corpses over there in that morgue of the intellect known as
"academe".

On the other hand, out here in the real world where stuff is
happening, see for yourself the sort of thing Robert Whitaker's been
up to in his writing, ever since he and his baby moved out of that
grass shack up on stilts over a beach in Ecuador . . .

http://www.themapmakerswife.com/Mapmaker%27s%20Wife/Author.html
http://www.madinamerica.com/Mad%20In%20America/Home.html
http://www.onthelapsofgods.com/On%20the%20Laps%20of%20Gods/Home.html
--
JM http://whosenose.blogspot.com
http://jesusexegesis.blogspot.com