320 pages
English language
Published Jan. 12, 1999 by Dial Press Trade Paperback.
I don't generally review the books I read, but "Biafra: A People Betrayed" from this collection has been forever seared into my memory. I didn't sleep right for days after reading it, and thinking of it fills me with unimaginable sadness even a decade later.
The column on the 1972 Republican convention was eerie. It could have been written yesterday: the grandstanding, the hypocrisy, the jesus, the warmongering, the contempt for anyone with insufficient golf club memberships. Even the peaceful protesters and the police intimidation thereof. Forty years. The names have changed. Nothing else has.
On the whole, not a good book: inconsistent, often dated, occasionally incoherent. But the good stuff—his essay on Biafra, the abovementioned column, the Playboy interview—the good stuff is Very Good.
