Deja Reviews by Florence King

The specter of infinite recursion is always before me, but never more so when I'm about to review a book of book reviews. If I'm not careful, who knows how tightly I could contort myself? But I'll try to soldier on.

Florence King is one of the modern world's great curmudgeons; her best book is the sublimely grumpy With Kindness Towards None, a history of misanthropy. She's also had an interesting, complicated life -- chronicled in her mostly autobiographical Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and in dribs and drabs in her other books -- but settled into life as a conservative columnist and book reviewer at the beginning of the '90s. (She's also one of many people on the right who had an interesting and complicated sex life when she was young, but would rather ignore the subject entirely now that her ardor has cooled. Luckily, writing for uptight right-wing magazines makes it easy to avoid even thinking about sex for years at a time.)

Deja Reviews collects her book reviews -- some? all? the book doesn't say -- from 1990 through 2001, from The American Spectator and National Review. There's the expected spate of political books, some popular histories, and other assorted and mostly-topical non-fiction.

To be blunt, she's against nearly all of it, from the men's movement to Ayn Rand's followers to Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation. (Though, oddly for a conservative, she seems to quite like Eleanor Roosevelt as a person.) She's not a movement conservative, or one of the religious right. She's probably economically conservative, but mostly because she expects everything to go all to hell at any moment. She doesn't seem to be over-fond of current right-wing politicians and leaders (which failing, and fawning, over personal friends has made two other right-wing writers, Ben Stein and P.J. O'Rourke, only intermittently tolerable in recent years). Really, the main thing holding her to the right side of the political world is a firm belief that the world is bad and getting worse. (Well, that and a dislike of liberals -- but there are plenty of Democrats who hate the kind of liberals that King attacks.)

Collections of book reviews are bad books to read straight through, which is more or less what I did with Deja Reviews. (Over the course of a about a week, yes, but this was the big book I was reading at the time.) And I doubt that there are all that many huge Florence King fans out there, besides me. Serious right-wingers will probably find her unsound on at least one item of doctrine, and the fact that this book ends in June of 2001 will make it seem beside the point to a whole lot of that crowd to begin with. So I'm really not sure who this book is for -- and publishers might have been equally puzzled, because this book came out from that powerhouse of book-making, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.