Provoked by the publication of Jimmy Carter’s White House Diary last month, Joe Queenan considers the entire corpus of Carter works in the very funny Wall Street Journal column “Jimmy Carter: Can’t stop the typing.” Buried in the Journal’s excellent weekend review section, the column was easy to miss. Just about every paragraph made me laugh out loud. Here is Queenan on Carter’s White House Diary:
Carter’s extraneous exhumation of the musty old diary he kept during his four long, horrid years in office suggests that he is scraping the bottom of the barrel for material. Publishing a diary describing the four years in office that were so awful they got you booted out into the street is like George Pickett publishing “Gettysburg Diary” or Mike Brown publishing “Quiet Days in Katrina: A FEMA Diary.” And if Carter’s gone back to the dismal years 1977-80 to exhume diary material, what comes next? “Tuesdays with Bert Lance”?
Highly recommended.
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