The [Un]documented Mark Steyn lands in bookstores across the US and Canada today and I'll be out and about plugging it all week. You can catch me live on Fox & Friends just after 8am Eastern/5am Pacific this morning, and on the radio with Sean Hannity coast to coast at 3pm Eastern. I'll be checking in with Hugh Hewitt nationwide for a two-hour special starting at 7pm Eastern. Full details at right.
Hugh gives the book "five stars for funny plus despair-inducing". I wouldn't say there's that much despair, but there's certainly plenty of funny. [Un]documented is a grand cavalcade of my writing from the last couple of decades or so, from publications around the world - America, Canada, Britain and beyond - plus some favorite riffs from my guest-hosting stints for Rush Limbaugh and even from my stage appearances. It deals with all the big topics - like Islam - but also all the small stuff - like Kinder Eggs - that help illuminate the big picture. The New York Post has a generous excerpt, which they introduce as follows:
Though his new collection of essays, "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned" (Regnery), recounts many of the biggest political events of recent history, bestselling author Steyn says that's not the real battleground. While everyone is focused on the 2014 midterms, the question about where our country is headed is being decided in our entertainment and our schools.
That's to say, culture trumps politics. So, if you sit out the big cultural battles, you're losing. Scaramouche was struck by this passage:
What will we be playing catch-up to in another 28 years? Not so long ago, I might have suggested transsexual rights. But, barely pausing to celebrate their victory on gay marriage, the identity-group enforcers have gone full steam ahead on transgender issues. Once upon a time there were but two sexes. Now Facebook offers its 1.2 billion patrons the opportunity to select their preference from dozens of "genders": "male" and "female" are still on the drop-down menu, just about, but lost amid fifty shades of gay — "androgynous," "bi-gender," "intersex," "cisfemale," "trans*man," "gender fluid" . . .
Oh, you can laugh. But none of the people who matter in American culture are laughing.
Indeed. It's all very serious - as the Wellesley student found out when she transitioned into a bloke called Timothy and lost the gig as "diversity coordinator" on the grounds that she was now a white male.
Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, made the far shrewder decision to transition into a Cherokee. Here's another excerpt that tickled The New York Post's fancy:
Just in case you're having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of epidemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as a Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. Under the Third Reich's Nuremberg Laws, Mrs. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it's the other way round. Progress!
There's lots more in the The [Un]documented Mark Steyn - from Viagra side-effects to the Magati Ke language, Osama to Obama, guns to groping, Reagan to road signs, clones to drones, rock'n'crocs... Along the way, I share some stories from dinner at Buckingham Palace, an aggrieved letter from Salman Rushdie's secure location, and my first thoughts on seeing Ground Zero.
~Tomorrow, Tuesday, I'll be launching the book in Canada with my old comrade from the free-speech wars, Ezra Levant, on the Sun News network. And keep an eye and ear out in the days ahead for media visits with Dennis Miller, Mark Levin, Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Neil Cavuto, Janet Mefferd, Michael Medved and many more. You can find full details of my TV and radio appearances every day in our "On The Air" box on the right-hand side of this page.
Also this week, I'll be joining Sean Hannity, Katie Pavlich, Bobby Jindal, Dana Loesch and more at the Chicago Freedom Summit starting this Friday.
~As for the book itself, you can buy it in hardcover from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million in America, or Indigo-Chapters, Amazon and McNally-Robinson in Canada. It's also available in e-format via Kindle, Kobo, Nook - and, for your iPhone et al, via iBooks.
North of the border, we're already in the Politics Top Ten, although there's a lot more than politics in the book. Hugh Hewitt calls my essay "'Moon River' And Me" worth the price of the book all by itself. So just for Hugh...
