What's the Secret of HumTIMING!

Julian Sanchez | October 12, 2006

I've got a longer post about this back at chez moi, but James Wolcott' flensing of Dinesh D'Souza's repellent-sounding new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (yes, really) is worth a gander. Not just for the amusing savagery of the prose, but for the deft (and, as Wolcott notes, rather unusual) stroke of launching the attack in response to a galley copy, over three months before the book appears in stores. A week before release, getting slagged by a Vanity Fair columnist might help move a few copies. Now, the controversy burns itself out well before anyone's in a position to buy the thing, opening the possibility that the book will be rendered passé before it's even published. If that was Wolcott's intention, it's laudably devious.