(The Undocumented Mark Steyn) [By: Steyn, Mark] [Nov, 2014]

by Mark Steyn

He's brash, brilliant, and drawn to controversy like a moth to a flame. For decades, Mark Steyn has dazzled readers around the world with his raucous wit and brutal honesty. Whether he's sounding off on the tyranny of political correctness, the existential threat of Islamic extremism, the "nationalization" of the family, or the "near suicidal stupidity" of America's immigration regime, Steyn is always provocative—and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. The Undocumented Mark Steyn gathers Steyn's best columns in a timeless and indispensable guide to the end of the world as we know it.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Essays, History

Hardcover

First published October 13, 2014

About the author

Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and cultural commentator. He has written numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Steyn has been published by magazines and newspapers around the world, and is a regular guest host of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show. He also guest hosts Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appears as a guest.

Steyn lives and works mainly in Woodsville, New Hampshire. He is married, and has three children.

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Steyn is one of those authors whom I have ceased to be objective about. He is brilliant, witty and courageous. He doesn't let the political correctness police frighten him. As I read his columns/books I am usually cheering him on whilst laughing at his awesome word play.

One example of many in this book:

I saw a fellow in a Don't Tread on Me T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but having them pawed while wearing a Don't Tread on Me T-shirt is certainly one of them.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's simply the best. A man who understands what's ailing this poor world, and writes about it with verve and humour. Long may he wave.

[Rex Libris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally came across Steyn in America Alone, where he talks about Western demographics in relation to the rest of the world and how that would affect Western culture. I was not aware he had a far broader ouvre in the arts and music from previous work. [Un]documented is a great collection of his work over the years, from the 90's to the present day.

The clarity and humor of Steyn's writing style makes for great reading. The content (or dire predictions of the future of free society) can be unsettling. The demographic trends are there in front of our noses, but no one is willing to address the consequences of those trends should they continue.

[Naftoli · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could give this 6 stars.

[Nadine Lumley · Rating 1 out of 5]

How the he11 did Mark Steyn get a book published you ask? Why are his numbers inflated / reported on amazon.com? I guess Koch brothers bought & threw away a few thousand copies...

...................

Book Advance Money: A bribe by another name

1% Corporate Billionaire-owned MSM give large, undeserved “book advance” money to useful right-wing Conservative / Republican idiot puppets (Politicians for example, or neocon echo chambers) which are disguised bribes to reward the useful idiot for helping keep the elite in power.

snip snip: …consider the unsettling tale of how former Senate minority leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, seemed to lose interest in challenging media consolidation—an issue on which he had been a good player

—after Murdoch’s publishing house offered Lott a $250,000 book deal for the senator’s forgettable memoir, Herding Cats.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/162083/...


.....

Bob Altemeyer, an amazing Canadian from Winnipeg, put his book "The Authoritarians" on the internet for free:

http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/...

He is a retired psychology professor in Canada who has spent most of his life studying authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves.

It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want--which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal.

In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars both hot and cold.

But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I'm going to present the case in this book the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.


--- What he thinks he's found is rather important to the survival of American democracy. As such, it should be made available to everyone, and be essentially free.


Bob Altemeyer
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Canada




-00-

[R.p.l. Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an avid reader of Mark Steyn's various columns as well as a regular visitor to his web page, I was worried that much of the material in this anthology would be familiar. I was pleasantly disappointed. Although many of the themes would be familiar to regular readers, and some of the choice lines from these columns have been lifted and incorporated into books like America Alone and After America, this is a treat for new and regular readers alike.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good stuff - this book is a compilation of his columns loosely organized by topic, which makes it very easy to skip around and read the subject matter you find most appealing, while foregoing the less compelling sections.

Very well written without being dumbed down to a 5th grade vocabulary; if you're looking for a good skewering of popular culture and government, this is a great place to start.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The pen is mightier than the sword“ is one of the most illusory refuges there is: the mob’s reaction to an articulate man’s powers of persuasion has invariably been to kill him.

This is a great collection of Steyn’s writings from 1987 to 2014. Which means it references everything from books (Salman Rushdie, 1990) to politics (2001 and on, for the most part) and back to music (Stephen Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer, his 2014 song of the week). There are references to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1995), the Ayatollah’s death sentence against author Salman Rushdie (1990), and Modern Family (2013).

This is a general collection and covers a wide variety of topics, which means that it repeats some essays from his more specific collections. Most of the repeats are well worth reading again, such as his obituary for President Reagan and his skewering of the general press’s reporting on the “Brutal Afghan Winter”, reporting that appeared to be nothing more than taking press releases at face value well past when their failure should have been obvious.

Steyn has his feet in three worlds: London, Montreal, and New Hampshire. I find, re-reading this after having visited Montreal, that it helps a little to have a passing familiarity, so as to know what he’s talking about when he references, say, Sherbrooke Street (it’s one of the major walkable commercial thoroughfares running through the city). He includes footnotes for some of the really obscure stuff, mostly about Canada or Britain in the last century, but you can’t footnote everything.

So it will also help to have a little familiarity with small-town America, to appreciate the Memorial Day poetry by High School students (in this case, his own daughter).

The Stars and stripes, red, white, and blue
Wave above our heroes true
It makes us cry, it makes us weep
But in our hearts we will keep
The sacrifice our soldiers gave, they shall not die in vain
For they have given us the freedom they have fought to gain.

Much of the political content is his trademark pessimism, though it’s usually hard to argue with.

The United States has the most powerful government, with the longest reach, of any nation in history. It is also the Brokest Nation in History. Resolving that contradiction is unlikely to be pretty.

Or his post-September 11 essay that, in typical Steyn fashion, ends with the first world war:

By the time the Great War was really over, four of the world’s great powers lay shattered—the German, Austrian, Russian, and Turkish Empires, all gone and so easily, though who would have predicted it in that last Edwardian summer? We don’t know what this latest thread of history will unravel. But we should at least understand the stakes.

Steyn is a very readable writer with a wide fund of knowledge to draw on; there is very little in here that isn’t one or more of funny, insightful, or touching.

Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862, 1843-1864.

[Emi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Americans keep trying to blame the Muslim people for everything.
I am shocked that after 40 years of repeating these ideas and watching the countries economy get weaker and weaker, this author is still at it.

Isn't insanity repeating the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result?

It's time for us to take responsibility and clean up our own back yard.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good writing, though I like him better live, as a substitute host for Rush.

[Craig · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got about half way through, but couldn't finish it. Too many of the pieces referred to events too far in the past to still be interesting.

[Alejandro Heracles al-Mu'minin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I laughed, I cried and let out many loud sighs.

[MrsRead1 · Rating 1 out of 5]

changed my rating to one star. I expected better.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

America’s Undocumented Anchorman from far northern New Hampshire has done it again! I’m usually not a big fan of compilations of articles, but Steyn is one of the few personalities worthy of such a book. His unique sense of humor emanating from his Canadian-English-American background will make you literally laugh out loud at times. I enjoyed his other books that were focused on topics more, but this is still a good use of your time.

[Larry Shackley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a fan of Mark Steyn for ages. He's got a vicious and unbridled wit, and a wealth of knowledge on everything from politics to Broadway. This book is a collection of many short pieces from the periodicals he's written for, mostly from the Clinton years to the Obama years (with plenty of comments on both). If you want laughs with some insight built in, this is an ideal book. The chapters only take a few minutes each, so you can pick it up and read a bit anytime.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF doesn't even cover how much I don't even want to breath the same air as people even thinking about politics right now. Maybe a couple of years further down the road, I'll be more interesting in furthering a broader perspective but now, no thanks!

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can consider almost every sentence in and of itself is a kind of troll, in this internet day of age.

So much so that you have to stop every now and then to renew yourself from the numbness of the this continuous thought provoking excise.

[George Polansky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of articles written by Mark Steyn. Most are political allare interesting.

[Jordan Maloney · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt like the author was really off-putting (even though he warned me).

[Bob Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of Steyn's works over the last 15 years. Before reading this book I had read two others which focused on the effect of changing population on politics. There is a taste of those subjects in this collection, but it also covers a variety of cultural subjects such as popular music, British royalty, literary fueds and Broadway.

Steyn has an enjoyable writing style, a way of using cultural references and twisting a phrase which I find very amusing. And I have to say, I learned more about the songwriter, Stephen Foster is 6 pages than if I had read a 250 biography.

One problem with the book is that Steyn is a very topical writer. There were writings dating back into the 1990's and early 2000's that are now very dated and less effective than the current pieces. But there is plenty of material here that is right on target.

[Ktmholm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a compilation of the author's newspaper and magazine columns and radio commentaries. I preferred his previous books--AMERICA ALONE and AFTER AMERICA--and was not impressed by his literary and film reviews. But when he writes about political correctness and politics in general, he is spot on.

[Rhonda Perkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Steyn is conservative, witty, and brilliant. He follows politics in 5 or 6 different countries, but he doesn't stop there. He's also an expert in musicals, pop culture, and history. This book is a compilation of some of his articles. So you can enjoy it in small bursts of time. I'm a fan of Steyn, his writing, and his politics.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff, sometimes hard to read.

[Geekfork · Rating 4 out of 5]

alot of the same stuff I'd read before but can always read again, some I hadn't and was glad to get to read, some I couldn't be bothered with. I prefer America Alone slightly more.

[J]

Mark Steyn is great. I love his political pieces chalked full of satire.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cudos to Mark for putting himself on the line and telling it like it is. Compelling reading. Truth is stranger and scarier than fiction!

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some solid, well-argued opinions on interesting topics. Unfortunately, reading an entire tome of one person's work inevitably gets tiring (the style of writing can get old quickly).

[Kyle Grindberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

And again, Mark Steyn keeps me mentally stimulated, laughing, and turning the page. I can't recommend him enough.

[Jeffrey Falk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may or may not get a review of this trenchant, hilarious one published.

[Victoria]

A collection of columns from past years. Some more interesting or relevant than others. Just not what I was looking to read just now.