Definitive review of a definitive account
So when David Rees and I were figuring out how to do a collected Get Your War On, we decided to be aggressive. Rather than have it be a collected, we decided to called it "The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001-2008" and try to get David on network news as a pundit, or on some show that purported to gaze reflectively on the past eight years.
Well, we have complete control over how we subtitle a book so we did, and no control over TV producers and they ignore us, but some folks not only got the joke of the subtitle, they also got that it wasn't at all a joke. This is me quoting David Rees quoting J. Caleb Mozzocco
Here’s a nice article about the big GYWO book that google alerts found for me. (Google alerts is like TIVO for the internet.)
And you know what? Rees was right like, 95% of the time (One thing he got wrong was when one of his characters, shocked that eight weeks of bombing Afghanistan had yet to kill bin Laden, said that U.S. bombing raids must be like the elixir of eternal life, and that Saddam Hussein would therefore live to be 400-years-old). He was certainly more right more often than, say, The New York Times or NBC News or Newsweek or Time or Bob Woodward, and therefore deserves the right to put “definitive account” on his book more than just about anyone else who consistently commented on the war.
