Showing posts with label simon maxwell apter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simon maxwell apter. Show all posts

Sunday, January 20, 2008

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD in The San Francisco Chronicle

Maybe Sean Penn has a point. The San Francisco Chronicle seems a little dazed and confused these days, especially after reading Simon Maxwell Apter's bizarre review of Mark Booth's The Secret History of the World this weekend. Apter, an assistant editor at Lapham's Quarterly, seems most offended by Booth's wide-ranging survey of the influence of Secret Societies: "Concocting a sort of literary Long Island Iced Tea, Booth throws every liquor he can find into his cocktail. The predictable result is overwrought, overflavored and overblown. A Long Island Iced Tea can be an entire night's worth of drinking in one glass; Booth's history is an attempt to cram an entire library's worth of scholarship into a single volume."