Customer Reviews

Unarmed but Dangerous: A Withering Attack on All Things Phony, Foolish, and Fundamentally Wrong With America Today

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This is a collection of journalistic essays from Hal Crowther, also known as Lee Smith's husband. The guy is a very stylish writer who pulls no punches, and although philosophically liberal, Crowther is quite capable of pissing people off at all points of the political spectrum. His subjects are varied enough to maintain the reader's interest through 300 plus pages and although Crowther comes off as a bit of a curmudgeon, he is able to express sympathy when it is deverved.

Hal Crowtther, a child of the '60s generation, sees our world through a slightly cynical prism. There certainly have been depressing events over the last 38 years, but Crowther's liberal bias makes him less the objective observer and more of a crank. The book is well written, mostly a review of newspaper columns he wrote over the years. The publisher compares him to Mencken, one of my favorites, but where Mencken pricked all balloons, Crowther pricks only conservative balloons, and a few of them justly so. He comes close to Molly Ivins' style but lacks her knife point humor. I enjoyed the book, but I hoped for somewhat better than I found. 3 stars is adequate.