Lands a few bullseyes amidst a barrage of cheap shots

Reviewed by E. A. Lovitt, 2007-07-29

Political humor is fleeting and the essays in this collection span the decade between 1986 and 1996. Who now remembers Gennifer Flowers, William J. Bennett and "The Book of Virtues," or Donald J. Trump?

Actually Andrew Ferguson remembers Gennifer Flowers quite well as he devotes two essays to her, and he seems to be fixated on other blonde bimbos as well, devoting print to Madonna, Mamie Van Doren, Marilyn Monroe, Morgan Fairchild and others whose names I don't recall. Here's a political satirist with an obsession, and for a change it's not the current president or the senator from New York.

There are several cheap shots in "Fools' Names, Fools' Faces." Walter Cronkite is savaged in passing, but we are never told why he is lumped into the category of "utterly vacant men." David Gergen is castigated as a "Goggle-eyed melon head" for switching from the saintly Ronald Reagan's administration to the man who did because he could, Bill Clinton. Isn't descending to nasty physical description about the same level of civilized discourse as, "Nah, nah, Johnny wets his bed at night?"

Those two quibbles aside, there's some good stuff in here. Don Imus, the radio host shows up in the essay "Don Imus's Sacrilege," not over his derogatory comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team (2007), but over his derogatory comments about the President at a Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner (1996). Admittedly these affairs are set up so that the President can be lampooned, but there are limits, and Imus gleefully trampled all over them. Good for him. I wish the author had given more detail about what Imus had said, but maybe he wasn't invited to the dinner.

The shortest essays tend to be the funniest, and another good one is "Puff the Magic Dragon Goes to Jail" (March 1986) although the author is rather hard on Mary for getting fat.

"Trust Us: The Mystery of the Supreme Court" (November 1993) explains why the Supreme Court should be moved to Billings, Montana.

Ferguson is at his shameless best in "The Donald Writes a Book" (September 1990), where he flaunts a dead-on imitation of the Great One's tell-nothing style. (If the Donald's book were a strip-tease, he would leave the stage fully clothed).

To tell you the truth, I read "Fools' Names, Fools' Faces" in order to cleanse my palate for Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country," but I ended up enjoying Ferguson, cheap shots and all, quite a bit more than Moore's whining exposé.

Maybe I'm getting old.

A Very Good Book from a Very Good Writer.

Reviewed by Gray Flannel Dwarf, 2007-05-05

Andrew Ferguson is one of the veteran writers at the Weekly Standard and a good friend and peer in satire with P.J. O'Rourke. While O'Rourke, however, is more taken with the sharp biting and often gonzo style of a writing idol, Hunter Thompson, Ferguson is more subtle -- more understated -- but equally effective in his own right.

All in all Ferguson is a very very good writer and the collection of pieces in this book provide a good starting point -- reading his more recent WS work and his columns for Bloomberg is also recommended.

Ferguson is not an ideologue and his book pokes fun at all stripes (that is Newt Gingrich in clown makeup on the front).

a Fun look a society

Reviewed by Kim F. Hill, 2001-11-03

I highly recommend this wity and sometimes brillant look at our world.

buy an extra copy for your spouse

Reviewed by Orrin C. Judd, 2001-03-19

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, Andy's not someone who comes out as much as some of the rest of us and just baldly declares something. His--his writing--he's a much better writer than I am, a more supple writer, and his writing leads you in different feints and the power of the writing is sometimes not clear until you read it carefully. -C-SPAN Booknotes with David Brooks, July 2000

Ever since I heard David Brooks praise his colleague so effusively on Booknotes last Summer, I've made a particular effort to search out Andrew Ferguson's stuff in The Weekly Standard. Brooks is absolutely right : Ferguson's essays for the magazine are extremely sly and they conclude with a distinctive kick, as he forcefully drives home a point you may only have been mildly aware he was making. An excellent example is Christianity, Clinton Style (Weekly Standard, September 11, 2000), in which he discusses the then President's pre-Convention public confessional at Willow Creek Community Church. This was the event at which Clinton was supposed to apologize for the Lewinsky mess with sufficient clarity that it would remove the subject as an issue for Mr. Gore in the fall campaign. In his column, Ferguson does not spare Clinton for the transparency and insincerity of the event, but it is only as you read the last sentence that you truly realize that Clinton is only an incidental target : Ferguson's real ire is directed at the brand of New Age Christianity which allows itself to be used in such a manner by a clearly unrepentant serial sinner. But when the realization finally dawns it is all the more devastating precisely because the equation of the obviously repulsive Clinton and the theoretically sacred Church is so surprising.

Fools' Names, Fools' Places is a collection of earlier pieces and it seems as if Ferguson had not quite perfected this technique when some of them were written. They are however very funny and they do reflect several of the concerns which he returns to again and again in his writing : the intellectual poverty of those New Age beliefs and the increasing divergence between celebrity and substantive achievement in American culture. At times these concerns fuse brilliantly as in the devastating portrayals of Bill Moyers and Mikhail Gorbachev, both of whom have made the long strange trip from Left Wing hatchetmen to sort of self-help gurus. But in most of them, it is merely the callowness and vapidity of the rich and famous that is on display. A couple of the funniest ones are on Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra (Sinatra at 80 : Ring-a-ding-don't). In fact, I started laughing so hard at a line in the Streisand profile :

With her cavernous sinuses, her inexhaustible lungs, she doesn't so much sell a song as wrestle it to the ground and kneel on its throat. She should try this with her songwriters.

that my wife made me let her read the essay, right away. After that, we kept stealing the book back and forth from each other, the one grabbing it from the other while they were convulsed with laughter. (This is what passes for entertainment in your average conservative household--sharing a collection of vituperative columns like dissidents used to pass around samiszdat in the old Soviet Union.) In fact, my wife got so carried away, in the midst of the essay about Peter, Paul and Mary being arrested (Puff the Magic Dragon Goes to Jail) at an anti-apartheid demonstration, that our four year old son ran upstairs to tell me that, "Mommy isn't breathing." I think it was this line that did it, about how the years haven't been kind to Mary, particularly poundagewise :

As she belted out the songs, she wagged her head and threw her body from side to side, while the other celebrities struggled to anchor themselves against the assault of her weight.

We both enjoyed the paired essays about Ferguson appearing on a talk show as the designated Gennifer Flowers defender and the trouble this got him into with his wife. What wife after all wants her husband defending a harlot on national television ?

And lest you assume that all the book consists of is scurrilous right wing screeds, there are plenty of equally acerbic glances cast at Republicans and conservatives--Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett and David Gergen among them. More importantly, Ferguson is toughest on himself and his profession. This is the other major theme of the collection, and of much of his other writing : the pomposity of the press. Whether belittling himself for appearing as a talking head on cable television, or hilariously dissecting the modern GQ/Esquire/Vanity Fair-style personality piece--the ones that all seem to start : "I met (insert name of star) for lunch at (insert name of trendy restaurant)..."--the authors of which all seem to labor under the delusion that they are themselves integral to the story, Ferguson holds up a rather harsh light to journalism as it is practiced today.

In a culture which is increasingly dominated by celebrities, politicians and the press, he happily skewers all three. He does so in a series of essays which are as funny as any you'll ever read. You should definitely read the book, but in the meantime keep an eye out for his current writing. By himself he makes it worth checking out the Weekly Standard every week.

GRADE : A

Not in P.J.'s league.

Reviewed by Watujel, 2000-01-04

This guy has been hyped by O'Rourke and the very talented Jonah Goldberg, but the laughs are few and far between. He just can't find the humor in every situation like P.J. can. In the Booknotes interview, Ferguson talks about how he really doesn't like writing all that much, and the lack of joy certainly shows.

His 1993 (i.e. pre-WWW) essay on the Internet, which takes the general tone of "this contraption will never amount to anything" was way off base, maybe because he wandered into alt.sex (desperately searching for some grist I guess but coming away with his usual pedestrian non-insights) instead of looking at the comp.* newsgroups.