Political Memes

Funny, that book. I went to find it on Wikipedia to see if it's something I'd read and there's recurring disagreement on the talk page about it. One gets the impression there is an effort to discredit the entire work, with an overt emphasis on calling it conspiracy theory along with the omission of anything positive.

I went to one of the review sources used, and it's true: the wiki author really did only quote the first line of the paragraph from the Boston Magazine article. The rest of the Boston Magazine article supports the praise, but the Wikipedia author chose to include only this:

Family of Secrets was trounced by the mainstream media: “There are more crutches in these pages,” wrote the Washington Post, “than in the grotto at Lourdes.”

Here's the rest of the source paragraph, the part they left out (emphasis mine):

And yet it’s an impressive feat of reporting, its pages filled with constellations of intriguing and often troubling facts. Baker’s editor, Peter Ginna, told the New York Observer in 2009, “I worked at Oxford University Press for 10 years and published several Pulitzer Prize–winning historians, and I have not published any book that was more extensively documented and more impeccably footnoted than this one.” Gore Vidal called it “one of the most important books of the past 10 years.”

Interesting editorial choices. It's almost like someone doesn't want anyone to take it seriously. But if it's that well researched and documented, and it appears to be, then it's not just an unfounded conspiracy theory, is it.

I'd read it just to find out what someone's so upset about in there that they have to try to make it look like a hack job. And Gore Vidal, for all his personal foibles, was prescient about what was going on in this country long before the rest of us had any idea the fascists were taking over, and a recommendation from him was high praise: I'd read it just for that.