A reader took notice of my recommendation the other
day. (OK, if you must know, it was one of my staff of thousands who took notice.) He writes:
Jan, we bought the Watson book “Ideas.” It is good, but not as good as I had hoped. Too
breezy. I like a tighter line. He spends a lot of time on religion. Not my idea of important ideas.
Those are such subjective beliefs, why even argue about them. Same goes for whether there is
some mysterious inner being. Who gives a damn. The business about emptiness is a couple of
pages at the very end. He mentions Gray in the discussion, which is perhaps why Gray gave so
much weight to that tiny part of the book. It’s like reviewing a Mercedes and devoting half the
article to the hood ornament.
It’s one thing to diss the review, another to diss the book under review. To do both — a
double diss — rates a 3.6 degree of difficulty. That last
sentence puts him in the water without a splash.
