SFist Reads

SFist Intern Luisa is reading Oh the Glory of it All, by Sean Wilsey, editor at large for McSweeney's and offspring of San Francisco society-page staples Al Wilsey and Pat Montandon. The book recounts Wilsey's turbulent adolesence complete with the evil stepmother Dede Wilsey, trips to 4 different boarding schools, and the joy he finds navigating San Francisco's hills on his skateboard. Wilsey does a great job of sharing his life as a true San Francisco boy and showing how screwed up high society can really be.

SFist Derrick cheerfully riffled through the new GAMES magazine last night. While the feature article didn't grab him, the back article on Nintendo's upcoming Wii system got him all frothed up again. He just hopes that pre-orders don't open while he's on vacation, lest he have to wait until after Christmas to get one. The new issue of the magazine also has some new-to-Derrick logic puzzle genres, so he's looking forward to some spare time to tease them apart.

SFist Jon is still hacking his way through The Assassins' Gate by George Packer, so far the definitive account of the Iraq War. He's about three-quarters of the way through and all he can say is, woah nellie, we sure did screw this thing up. Totally and unequivocally. It's like if you were to put together a list of everything you need to do before invading a country and then did the complete opposite of it, that's what we did. The book is an account of everything we did wrong, from intellectual hubris and a lack of planning, to turf-war spitball fights and an amazing inability to bone up on Iraqi history before leaping in. But the book is much, much more than liberal porn, four hundred pages of Bush bashing. Packer, a reporter for the New Yorker, was one of those ambivalent Liberal Hawks who supported the war initially not necessarily because he believed in Bush's grand vision but because he had befriended an Iraqi exile and heard first-hand the horrors of Saddam-era Iraq. The book chronicles his sense of betrayal of his friend's cause and anguish at the unholy mess we've created there. Packer, in fact, holds no punches against the anti-war movement or week-kneed Democrats either for an inability to address the issues in a realistic sense or missing the entire point of everything. It's a little over-long and as it's just one long series of stories detailing mess after mess after mess, doesn't have much in the way of forward-momentum (it seriously needs some editing) but if you want the most accurate and detailed account of the mess in Mesopotamia, this book is a must read. (Ed note: On this recommendation of Jon's, this SFist started reading this book, and it's just as engrossing as Jon says. Check it out!)