In which Robin fails to laugh.
I found Stupid White Men in a Stockholm bookshop at a reasonable price (the shops here seem to have marked it up, for some reason), and it was pretty quickly devoured. It’s hard to know what to say about books like these, I think. It’s very good, of course, and Moore definitely has a point or two (or a hundred). I am puzzled, though, at how it can be described as «funny». The quote on the back from the San Francisco Chronicle is pretty typical of the sort of thing you hear about Moore: «Hysterically funny. The angrier Moore gets, the funnier he gets. Sensational.» Well, I mean, no, not really. I think I might have laughed once during the whole book. That’s not what I’d describe as hysterically funny. The Observer seem to have got the point, though: «Caustic, breakneck, tell-it-like-it-is… He’s a genuine populist; a twenty-first-century pamphleteer.»
I am not being very helpful about this, am I? Well, here’s some advice for you: Read this book. It’ll make you think even if it doesn’t make you laugh.