Evanier on the WaPo Gore book review

news from Mark Evanier:

"Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran a scathing review of Al Gore's new book. The review was written by Andrew Ferguson....here's the first paragraph of it...

You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

The Post has now added a "slight" correction to the online version of the review...

Andrew Ferguson's June 10 Outlook article, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," said that former vice president Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.

...The reviewer started right off by attacking Gore's book for not including footnotes that told us things like where he got a certain quote from Abraham Lincoln...but the book does include twenty pages of endnotes that tell us things like where he got that certain quote from Abraham Lincoln.

This kind of thing really baffles me, and I don't mean this as any kind of defense of Gore's book, which I have not read. I just don't get how an allegedly real newspaper like The Washington Post continues to print things that would have gotten me flunked in my high school Journalism class."