That would make Feagler one of Cleveland’s leading subversives, for his widely read newspaper columns regularly flout political correctness in favor of a simpler, more old-fashioned pursuit of the truth.
And he is no late-awakening reactionary. Feagler has been writing eye-opening columns with the same direct style now for three decades—since long before the concept of political correctness arrived on the scene.
Collected here are 129 of Feagler’s sharpest recent columns, originally published between fall 1998 and summer 2001. Whether the topic is politics or pop music, nostalgia or narcotics, Feagler aims straight and his words tend to strike right on target. Which explains why his columns are frequent fodder for Clevelanders’ daily water-cooler conversations. And why he infuriates so many of his critics. And why he hears so often from readers who say, “You tell it like it is—I might have said that myself.”
Feagler doesn’t see a lot of art to his success.
“I lay no claim to ‘telling it like it is,’” he writes. “I tell it like I think it is—or ought to be. But in an age when commentators tend to pull their punches, telling it like you think it is wins you some points.”
It has also won Dick Feagler a lot of regular readers.
