Christopher Rush

“N-a-k-e-d” is a strange way of spelling “boring.”  This book is really not interesting or provocative.  Hamilton spends a bizarre amount of time praising the Marquis de Sade as some sort of exemplar of humanity-literary behavior, followed by a preponderance of vitriol against religion and American presidents.  The attentive reader will also need a new hypocrisy meter after reading this, since it will overload and break somewhere around chapter 3.  Hamilton lambastes authors who use assisting teams, ghostwriters, and amanueses … all the while telling us how his graduate assistants (the goofy way college professors have of spelling “indentured servants”) gathered much (if not most) of the information retold within these pages while he was busy doing not his own research.  Hamilton lambastes boring and meaningless dedications in books … apparently forgetting the fact he has one in his own book.  In chapter seven, Hamilton feigns he is going to finally reveal the “most stolen books,” then backpedals with an excuse to the effect of “librarians don’t like to talk about it,” and finally pretends to give us a list of the most stolen books — but really are just representatives of types of books that probably get stolen a lot.  This book promises so much, yet despite an intriguing story-filled opening chapter, delivers mostly sub-interesting minutiae, vitriolic caterwauling, and a fecundity of dullness that even Thomas Shadwell might find lame.  Hamilton spends a chapter decrying the absence of negative reviews of books: here you go, sir.