A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture

by Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn was without question one of the most influential journalists of his generation, whose writing stems from the best tradition of Mark Twain, H.L. Menchken and Tom Paine. Colossal Wreck, his final work, finished shortly before his death in July 2012, exemplifies the prodigious literary brio that made Cockburn’s name.

Whether ruthlessly exposing Beltway hypocrisy, pricking the pomposity of those in power, or tirelessly defending the rights of the oppressed, Cockburn never pulled his punches and always landed a blow where it mattered. In this panoramic work, covering nearly two decades of American culture and politics, he explores subjects as varied as the sex life of Bill Clinton and the best way to cook wild turkey. He stands up for the rights of prisoners on death row and exposes the chicanery of the media and the duplicity of the political elite. As he pursues a serpentine path through the nation, he charts the fortunes of friends, famous relatives, and sworn enemies alike to hilarious effect.

This is a thrilling trip through the reefs and shoals of politics and everyday life. Combining a passion for the places, the food and the people he encountered on dozens of cross-country journeys, Cockburn reports back over seventeen years of tumultuous change among what he affectionately called the “thousand landscapes” of the United States.

Genres: Politics, Essays, History, Nonfiction, Journalism, United States, The United States Of America

576 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 11, 2011

About the author

Alexander Claud Cockburn was an American political journalist. Cockburn was brought up in Ireland but has lived and worked in the United States since 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also writes the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation and a weekly syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times as well as for The First Post, which is syndicated by Creators Syndicate.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Cockburn saw Barack Obama coming a mile away, like folks like me unfortunately did not. Had I been aware of his assenting vote for the FISA Act, before he began his presidential campaign, I might have voted for some other candidate. But I was ultimately so wrong about the man. Cockburn hits on so many levels at pretensions of the neoliberal (and neoconservative) state, that reading this is a wonder. I used to read his articles in the small newspaper (Anderson Valley Advertiser) he was a feature in. My employer had a subscription, and a coworker (or two) would peruse it for many, many interesting items. Not the least were Mr. Cockburn's. But I wish I could walk back that walk to the voting booth in 2008... I feel distinctly cheated that the person I elected to represent me represents only himself, the military-industrial complex, and the surveillance state. And that his compiled lies to the contrary were but a cynical means to an end, to get votes, but not to have to answer for the complaints of those who cast them his way. We took him at his word. His word amounts to no more than, as Mr. Cockburn says, "blather."
I'm also quite taken by his little one liner about US Marines "bellowing" "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." I don't think the Marines actually know much about any such place named Tripoli, although they do so often mention somewhere called "Triple-E."
But as Ambrose Bierce said, "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read the whole thing. Everything I know about Alexander Cockburn I learned from reading this book. It’s a series of dated entries stretching from 1995 to 2012 (the year Mr. Cockburn died). There’s really nothing that ties the book together; there’s no theme, or pervading tone, or—apparently—purpose to the endeavor. I did come away with an unambiguous sense that Cockburn was deeply impressed by libertarianism; so much so that he felt more affinity (and affection) for Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and even neoconservatism, than for anything (or anyone) on the left of the American political spectrum. (He bemoans “vulgar gossip” about Laura Bush while simultaneously peddling the same about Hillary Clinton.) Reading “A Colossal Wreck” was, I imagine, not that different from reading a 600-page book by Ann Coulter.

This is, on the whole, an unimaginative and humorless collection of conspiracies, right-wing fantasies, climate-change denial, Obama-hating, and general cranksterism. Page after page of cynical sneering at Clinton and Obama bookend a deafening silence on the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. In addition, there are lengthy passages about his family and a trip to India, as well as prolonged slagging of Christopher Hitchens and Hunter S. Thompson (both, incidentally, far more entertaining and engaging writers than Cockburn).

This was not a fun book to read. It didn’t make me laugh. It wasn’t intellectually provocative. It was, in short, a drudgery and a chore.

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to admit: I only read the 1st 100 pages. This is a REALLY long book.

There really isn't a plot of any sort, it's a mishmash of short stories. Cockburn may have been intelligent, but he was not concise.

[Jane Walker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I confess to never having heard of Cockburn, but I borrowed the book in the hope of finding some interesting writing on American politics and culture. There is some, and that it comes from a Marxist makes it different from the usual run of such books. But it got wearisome before long.

[Will Deyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 3 of my "12 books over 500 pages" challenge of 2019.

I learned so much from this. Alexander Cockburn has very strong views many of which I don't agree with, but I do find interesting (pretty comprehensive list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...)

Highlights for me are his trip to India and his father's story about Basil Murray. I also love everything in this about Obama - it's what I think has become obvious to a lot of people (me) more recently, but AC was pointing to his shortcomings from the outset.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1990s return like a nightmare through this journalistic diary. The decade on video already has the grainy look of history but like the painful tingling sensation of a kidney stone it's still on its way out. There is wife Hillary "Rodham" Clinton who is already recognized for the "imperious gleam" that provides "social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic policing." The Clintonite passion for talking about children as "investments" is perfect since managed capitalism needs regulation, and just like that, these precious creatures as fixtures on the stock market need to yield us a respectable rate on return. Bernie Sanders is recognized as early as August 1996 as the "hot-air factory from Vermont", requesting everyone vote for Bill Clinton from his "independent" position in the U.S. senate. And look out, here comes George W. where the wheels of language really spin off. Point is, perhaps, it may have done so long before the internet took off thanks to the sublime Al Gore.

It is nice to be reminded that if it weren't for the entertainment factor this year's presidential election would be the most depressing one since 1996 when Bob Dole ran to no purpose against Bill Clinton who won, and then proclaimed a "New Frontier" at his inauguration, a time and a place no one remembers and for good reason. The great leftist Perry Anderson said last year that he feels Richard Nixon was the most insightful American president on foreign policy in memory mainly for being cynical enough not to believe in American exceptionalism. You get a lot of that fine quality in this Irishman's book.

I love the big reveal in an intellectual/writer who is hard to pin down, for instance when Deleuze writes that if you love the imagination it is a cop-out to take drugs. For Cockburn it's his admiration for Kerouac, Edward Abbey and Hunter Thompson. It's one thing to admit this when you're young and wild, another entirely when you're the retiring sort.

Where did his cynicism originate? A hint is that Cockburn's father Claud wrote the novel Beat the Devil that became a movie starring Humphrey Bogart among others. Father appears in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. "Claud had been denounced by Senator McCarthy as the 84th most dangerous Red in the world and had therefore considered it prudent to publish the novel under the nom de plume James Helvick." Truman Capote was credited with the screenplay, meanwhile the movie acquired a cult following. "It has been amusing, if somewhat irritating over the years, to watch admirers of Capote see evidence of his literary skills pulsating in every word of the dialogue in (John) Huston's film." Capote barely had a hand in the writing, and yet he did nothing to contradict exaggerated accounts of his connection to the movie. And why should he? Once a writer becomes his reputation his work is essentially done.

Cockburn's first impressions of Obama in 2006 was that he noticed the senator trims his words and that he's part of the nuke Iran camp. Right on the first account, as much as that ever carries intent, magnificently, historically wrong on the second. Cockburn has been called a Tea Partier and an anti-Semite. Those are nasty names coming from those who have actually taken the time to read this book with it's democratic core. For me something about that core doesn't carry well into the 21st century in the way Chomsky's has. (I suspect that's because Cockburn's hatred of injustice was instinctive, which limits oneself to one's time when commenting on it, whereas Chomsky's has that plus a theoretical basis which has the capacity to transcend one's time.) The only thing left to do, then, was settle scores with Christopher Hitchens which should piss off the sycophants but I have no doubt will be the legacy.

[Robert Maharry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps the ultimate mixed bag of a book.

Cockburn predicted the shortcomings of spineless neoliberalism better than any other left-leaning writer out there. He was on the mark about the Clintons and Obama, and he foresaw economic collapse and the bailouts that left the many reeling and the few living high on the hog.

But his blind spots are incredibly glaring, from climate change to his affinity for Rand Paul and repeated bashing of Bernie Sanders as a "fake leftist." In the vein of other famous writers-- including the ones he trashes throughout A Colossal Wreck (Hitchens, in particular)-- Cockburn is guided by his own personal grudges and has that typical tendency to believe his feuds are way more interesting than they actually are.

The title fits: the book is unfocused, and there's no guiding narrative. But the moments of brilliance when he's taking on the Clintons, Obama, the Bushes and the entire American political establishment save for Gerald Ford make it worth a look.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my introduction to Cockburn. I admire his passion, and although I disagreed often among much of what I agreed with, I can appreciate his rogue spirit that made him a bit hard to pin down politically. That said, his rants often made him seem cantankerous and a bit thin-skinned, which I found a bit wearying in a nearly 600-page compendium. I think this collection could could have been a lot shorter. The title is also rather misleading, as very few of the articles involve time spent in his car. Some of the highlights include his writings on travels in India, his post- 9-11 thoughts, and his diatribes on overused phrases in political discourse. Often it was a bit of a slog.

[Garrett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cockburn has some incisive and prescient thoughts here, especially in regards to the Clintons and economic crises, all delivered in an entertainingly sarcastic style. His takedowns of Hitchens are also enjoyable. However, he comes across as a lunatic crank on any issue related to science (e.g., he regards the belief in anthropogenic climate as akin to a 9/11 truther conspiracy theory, and thinks all psychologists are quacks in the thrall of big pharma) to such a degree that it is frankly very difficult to take anything he says seriously.

[Fred R · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining set of notes, columns, and letters from an old-school leftist who, while never managing to be totally honest about his or his father Claud Cockburn's biases is still a much more interesting and engaging guy than anyone the new-school leftists can produce.

[Kamil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't agree with everything: why is this esteemed old-guard leftist so pro-gun, such a snob, and a Tea Party-sympathizer? But god is he a bloody good writer. True Fourth Estate-worthy adversarial journalist, Cockburn was.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/1...

Alexander Cockburn, who died of cancer at the age of 71 on July 21, 2012, was a prose powerhouse who left an admirable body of great columns about all manner of matters political and cultural.

Cockburn's last book, the posthumously released A Colossal Wreck (Verso), is a collection of some of his favorite writing from the early 1990s until shortly before his death. Its subtitle, A Road Trip Through Scandal, Political Corruption and American Culture, says it all.

The book is such a great read it even got a favorable review in that bastion of received mainstream wisdom The New York Times, a frequent Cockburn target. But in a classic Times touch Dwight Garner's review is graced with the headline “Finding Fault Everywhere He Looked.” Though Alex had a particularly sharp bullshit detector, he was far from a crank who found “fault everywhere.” A more appropriate title for the review could have been stolen from another great left-wing columnist's memoir, the British writer/activist Mark Steele's Reasons to Be Cheerful. Because as depressing as so much that Cockburn wrote about could be, he had the depth, inner resources and adaptability to look at bright sides of life and to communicate his enthusiasms in winning fashion. He had no patience for humorless, terminally dour lefties, always among his favorite objects of ridicule.

Here's an example of how entertaining his writing could be: after a day on the campaign trail with Ted Kennedy in 1980, Cockburn recalls that “I suggested to Kennedy's press man that it would surely be more a rational use of everyone's time and money to have a central campaign studio in the Washington suburbs, entrusted to one of the big Theme companies. Here the essential 'theme rides' of American electioneering could be permanently installed, under appropriate corporate logos. Campaigning politicians would be able to use the facility, getting the corporations to pick up some of the tab and collecting the balance from the press corps.” No word on the Kennedy staffer's response, alas.

Elsewhere in the book Alex calls Obama's January 2011 commitment to “clean, safe” nuclear power “as insane a statement as pledging commitment to a nice clean form of syphilis.” Never a booster of any but the most renegade Democrats, in December 2006 Cockburn wrote, “It's depressing to think that we'll have to endure Obamaspeak for months if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with homilies about putting factionalism and party divisions behind us and moving on […] I've never heard a politician so careful not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.”

Cockburn came from a family of great writers. His father Claud put out the influential left-wing newsletter The Week and wrote several incredibly funny novels, most famously Beat the Devil, which was made into a John Huston movie of the same name. Alex's brother Andrew is a veteran Washington and Middle East specialist who is currently Washington bureau chief for Harper's Magazine. Older sibling Patrick, one of the world's great war correspondents, authored The Occupation, among other books.

The Anglo-Irish wordsmith graduated from Oxford in 1963 and went to work at the Times Literary Supplement. From here he went on to The New Left Review and The New Statesman before leaving London in 1972 for the relatively sunnier climes of New York City. In the U.S. he launched the “Press Clips” column at the Village Voice, then still an independent paper with room for radicals. Alex's co-author on that column, James Ridgeway, referred to Cockburn as “the master.”

Alex Cockburn's Nation magazine columns went out of their way to puncture pomposity, attack privilege and to give support to a huge variety of underdogs. Being a regular reader of those broadsides, and later his Anderson Valley Advertiser column “Nature and Politics,” written with Jeffrey St Clair, helped me make up for my crappy education in U.S. public schools. Cockburn was wildly erudite, with a stunning command of the English language and a seeming ability to write knowledgeably about virtually anything, from global and national politics to gardening, the natural world, architecture, jazz, blues, literature and any other conceivable art. He had a tendency to go for the jugular when he was taking on bullies or abusers of power, and he didn't mince words. Regarding his tendency to use his column to skewer anyone who pissed him off, a good friend of his once told me that “what other people would take out, Alexander will leave in.” John Straussbaugh, one of his publishers, wrote “I found him brilliant, witty, irascible, vain, complicated, unpredictable, and never dull. A charming rascal.” He was never afraid of taking unpopular, even exasperating positions, sometimes to his detriment (sorry, humanity's carbon emissions have been definitively pinned to global warming).

Ken Silverstein, a veteran of the Cockburn intern experience, began the political newsletter CounterPunch in 1994. Alex joined Silverstein as co-editor, and when his younger colleague left to become a full-time freelancer in 1996, Jeffrey St. Clair replaced him. St. Clair also helped usher in the CounterPunch website, which he now edits along with the outlet's print edition.

I came into Cockburn's orbit as a Nation intern, where I served as an assistant to the great investigative journalist Allan Nairn. My pal Scott Handleman was Alex's intern, and after we left that quasi-job (with complimentary Nation hat and t-shirt, oh the perks of such noble toil!) Scott visited Alex at his gorgeous property on the Lost Coast of Humboldt County in Northern California. I went along for the ride through redwoods and a chance to visit the great radical journalist on his home turf. When introduced to him, Alex asked me where I came from. “Connecticut,” I answered sheepishly. “You poor bastard!” came the reply. I guffawed, not for the last time that weekend.

I remember thinking that waking up on Alex's couch and listening to him rummaging through his house, talking to his cat and various friends on the phone was a little like hanging out while Segovia noodled around on his guitar. The turns of phrase just bubbled out of him, and there was never a pedestrian or remotely boring word to be heard. Intrinsically entertaining, he was also a most gracious host. He even let me roam through his library and borrow any book I wanted to (I snagged a history of British leftist writers). Said book repository lined the walls of his study/writing room which had a revolutionary Mexican mural on its ceiling and printed matter inches deep covering its floor. What a great role model for a work space!

Scott and I got a nice tour of Alex's property, which included a pasture for his horses, and and went for a long walk along the Lost Coast, one of the most beautiful stretches of shoreline I've ever seen. It was indeed a beautiful break from city life.

Alex loved country living, but he also loved being on the road. He cruised the heartland in one of his classic American cars (not a catalytic convertor in the bunch, despite his life-long friendship with Ralph Nader) trying to tune in to something interesting on local radio frequencies, increasingly dominated by pablum-generating conglomerates like Clear Channel, as he was quick to point out in print. His travels took him to countless old and new friends and acquaintances throughout the U.S. This vast array of interesting sources steered him toward material for the various columns he kept up (in addition to The Nation, at various times he wrote for The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Press, and others).

Alex describes his father in a tribute included in A Colossal Wreck. These words could just as well apply to Alex: “He wrote fast, with a beautifully easy style. His prose could be light, ironic, also savage. He was learned but never overbearing, cultivated but never patronizing. He respected and enjoyed people at all social levels and ages […] He never soured on his ideals, never lost faith in humanity's nobler instincts, never failed to see the humor in life.”

[Chance Jungling · Rating 5 out of 5]

I noticed other reviews complaining about the "lack of narrative" in this book or his criticisms of "the left" and then implying that Cockburn was a "neoconservative." They're old reviews, but still if you came away from this book thinking that you either didn't read it, or know nothing of politics. He critiqued politicians like Obama and the Clintons hardest because they were the most powerful democratic politicians of the day and were supposed to be leftists, although proved they were nothing more than do-nothing centrist bullshit artists. And Cockburn is always critiquing them from the left. Also, the book never claims to be a narrative. It's just diary entries and letters. It's a book to keep on your nightstand and read as much of it as you want because it doesn't matter where you leave off. It's just interesting little bite-sized snippets from a man I believe to be a great writer and thinker. He was undeniably a leftist, and the worst thing you could probably say about him is that he was also a contrarian. But not in a way that has contempt or loathing for people. In this book you can tell how interested he is in human beings, and the respect he has for the common man. We miss his analysis today.

[Brett Warnke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cockburn was the first editor to publish me in the recession when I wrote a piece for Counterpunch. He was funny, courageous, amazingly erudite and interested in everything. Get this book. Read every page. There's literary allusions, slashing of mediocrities in D.C., and the diaristic jottings of someone always thinking their way through the world.

[JC]

This book was as orienting as it was hilarious. For me, becoming politically aware in the 2010s, this book filled in a ton of gaps and made me understand some of my intuitions about the cartoonish creatures who ran the country in the 90s/aughts.

[Phillip Drayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would suck to be Alexander Cockburn and be right about basically everything and have no one appreciate it. A great collection of his later writings.

[Edward]

I used to read Cockburn when his columns showed up occasionally on Chronicles. He is pretty funny at times. The reason I want to read this book is because of a great post that Steve Sailer made about Cockburn that touched on the book here:

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Whose Side to Choose if You Know What's Good for You
BY STEVE SAILER • AUGUST 4, 2014 • 600 WORDS • 80 COMMENTS

The late Christopher Hitchens and the late Alexander Cockburn were highly similar far left opinion journalists from the British Isles who settled in America, where they dazzled the colonists with their Oxford-honed facility with the Queen’s English.


Alexander’s niece Olivia Wilde, with Jason Sudeikis
Despite their Marxism, both were snobs and believers in good-bone-good-blood, although Cockburn had better cause for genealogical boasting: British history is littered with famous Cockburns. It no doubt chafed Hitchens that Cockburn, not he, was Evelyn Waugh’s first cousin once-removed.

But the careers of the two very similar men went in very different directions after they came to New York. Hitchens permanently ascended to the stratosphere of intellectual celebrity for his brilliant strategic ideas like invading Iraq; while Cockburn, after a good run in the 1980s in which even the Wall Street Journal featured his column regularly on its op-ed page (probably to remind readers why they hated leftists so much) was increasingly exiled to the fringes of the intellectual world.

Why?

Paul Berman explains in an endless denunciation of Cockburn’s posthumous book A Colossal Wreck in The New Republic:

Even in A Colossal Wreck he can’t help writing, “So now it’s anti-Semitic to attack banks and bond houses?”

It’s fun to quote extensively from Berman’s brief for the prosecution about why Cockburn was obviously a horrible person:

To judge from A Colossal Wreck, mostly he cultivated an interest in vintage cars and highway Americana. The scrapbook entries record his lonely automotive prowls along the interstate highways during his final 
seventeen years, savoring the down-market flavors of American idiosyncrasy, the Western towns with funny names, the oddball motels, and the Pentecostal radio broadcasts. A Colossal Wreck is in this respect a European tourist’s road book, unusual only for its warm enthusiasm for the folkloric American ultra-right.

Among Voice writers, the first Amendment was always the god of gods, but Cockburn dwells fondly over the Second Amendment. The Voice writers, some of them, loved rock festivals, but Cockburn’s inclinations bring him to gun shows. The Tea Party arouses his respectful attention. Ron Paul seems to him preferable to Bernie Sanders, because Sanders supported the war in Kosovo. He expresses an ardor for P. G. Wodehouse. He concedes that, during the World War, Wodehouse made the mistake of allowing himself to be broadcast over Nazi radio from Berlin, but he chooses to celebrate Bertie Wooster’s maker, even so, as “the greatest writer of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Flann O’Brien”—a sincere literary evaluation, I suppose, but also a sincere gesture of solidarity for one more upper-
class Brit with ultra-right–wing instincts who, unappreciated at home (given the broadcasts), felt obliged to live out his years on the lam in far-away America.

Most of all, Berman says of Cockburn, “A tin ear did him in.” Now, you might think that denouncing a man for admiring the comic perfection of P.G. Wodehouse betrays a bit of a tin ear in Berman, but you’re not holding the Megaphone, so who cares what you think?

I also like Berman’s belief that in 1989 the Village Voice spoke for “the subway masses.”

By the way, drifting off from the dreary topic of Berman, Cockburn’s love of driving across the American West reminds me of another Brit with perfect diction who also wandered off the expected path, Anthony Hopkins. Sir Anthony was Lord Olivier’s understudy at the Royal Shakespeare Company and he was supposed to become the next great stage Shakespearean. But who he really wanted to be was … Steve McQueen. So, Hopkins went to Hollywood and made horror movies and a motorcycle movie and assembled a fine collection of 1960s American muscle cars in which he spends his free time roaring around the empty highways of the Southwest.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a colossal wreck, so I can't exactly call it false advertising.  That doesn't mean that this book was anything other than a joyless slog through one snobby, effete Englishman's not very insightful dribbling about American culture and politics.  There are so many ways this book could have been good, but all of them would have required that someone else other than the author himself was writing them.  In some ways, I can empathize with the author as someone who was trying to be a woke political blogger and prolific book reviewer in the age before the internet took off, when all he had was writing to various leftist rags like the Village Voice as a way of keeping his name and writing before the eye of appreciative readers without very much sense or taste.  Much of this writing has the quality of hastily written blog posts from someone who thinks he is a lot more intelligent and insightful than he actually is, which could probably be said about most contemporary blogerati and this book was put together from years worth of writing by someone who thought that this writing deserved a bigger audience, for reasons I find baffling.

This book is introduced by the late author's son, who tries to paint this as something other than a disastrous collection of writings, and the materials are almost 600 pages long and divided into three parts.  The first part of the book covers Clinton's presidency, specifically the years between 1995 and 2000.  Here the author shows pity on Clinton for having to sneak sex with Monica and shows a characteristic obsession with leftist politics that are so extreme that he sees little difference between Democrats and Republicans as well as an obsession with sex of various kinds (especially homosexual, for reasons he explains in the book relating to the hostility of the Oxbridge elite of his time to conventional morality).  The second part of the book contains the author's puerile dribbles about Bush's presidency and various libels about his intellect.  While the author is most interested in politics, he frequently also shows an interest in literature and history, where he shows a casual anti-Zionist anti-Semitism and a predictable hostility to Christianity and a total lack of interest in flyover country.  The book then ends with a third part that focuses on Obama's presidency (and the author is rather harsh about Obama), after which the author's daughter writes an afterword and there is an index.

Ultimately, this book is filth, and not even very interesting filth.  There is enough in this book that it is clear that the author could have written good material.  He is certainly well-educated and well-read, and might have been a witty conversation partner when he wasn't looking down on Americans because of our characteristic middle-class ways (which he, as a limey aristocrat, looked down on), wasn't talking about politics (where his leftism is particular pronounced), or wasn't talking about sex or religion (where his views are simply submoronic).  Ultimately, this doesn't lead to very many things to talk about, and thus there isn't much in this massive book that is enjoyable at all.  Unless you are a fellow traveler with the author or think that someone from the Village Voice deserves to have their scribbling immortalized, this is a book you can safely pass.  Reading this book is far more punishment than pleasure, and while I learned a lot about the author's way of thinking, and why it is that he chose not to resist the corrupt and decadent culture of the time, it is a shame he did not resist.  The fact that the man served as a mascot for the decline of Western Civilization made this book fascinating to read as a cultural study, but deeply unpleasant from a moral one.

[Gnarly Authenticity . · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cockburn, a sprightly gnome of an old Communist recently gone to the great Party moot in the sky, was possessed by the same love for Americana that affected others of his cohort of boomer limeys such as Jagger & Richards, or Lennon & McCartney; all men who came of age at the peak of mid-20th century US cultural dominance: the bargelike finned vehicles, the romance of route 66, all that Wild West/Kerouac crap.

Despite his loathing for corporate imperialism and his extensive knowledge of the doings of the national security state, what comes through most clearly in "A Colossal Wreck" is his glee in the colorful antics of his adopted countrymen and his pleasure in being an American and a Californian. He manages perfectly a peculiar tonal balance; projecting an air of steady optimism and cheerfulness while actually seething with intense spite and malice (emotions delightful to me as a fan of Celine, Dostoevsky, and the rest). Christopher Hitchens in particular comes in for a brutal posthumous bit of score-settling.

Since there's no connection between the pieces other than the thread of Cockburn's longtime obsessions, one can dip in here and there without missing anything. A good bathroom book for libertarians, redneck hippies, old school leftists, Ron Paul fans and really anyone who feels the bile of spite rise in their gorge when Ezra Klein appears on MSNBC, or spits on the ground at the mention of Hillary Rodham CLinton.

[Ernest Nabokov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Verso published A Colossal Wreck in the hopes that it will introduce the man, the legend, that is Alexander Cockburn to a younger generation who wasn't alive to see him in his prime. Robin Blackburn called him the man who "inaugurated a style of attack and polemical journalism in the US unlike anything ever seen before". And it is true, casual readers of the Times and The Guardian, or even Vanity Fair will think that Christopher Hitchens, or James Wood brought the kind of British style attack journalism and popularized it in the states, but in fact it was Mr. Cockburn. Though this collection isn't better than either of the two in this triptych, it's a 5 star book simply for the fact that i got a pleasant reminder why I wanted to start writing in the first place. Alexander, farwell you inimitable chap, and may you're words and legacy create many Alexander Cockburns

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need to try not to read these kinds of books all in one go. Some of the entries are like a paragraph long. I am very much in agreement with everything Cockburn says for my hate is pure. But the start stop nature of this kind of book leaves me a little razzed.

My favorite portions were the descriptions of Medieval trials of animals. Also the hate.

[Joyceling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Commentaries year by year from 1995 through part of 2012, when the author died. Remember, his name is pronounced "Coh-burn" and not the way it looks. A fine read, easy to dip in and out. Fairly caustic commentary on everyone, many bits to share and read aloud.

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Razor sharp wit on every page. He was a great mind who never sold out even as everyone else did.

[Keith Alverson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some great pieces in here, but all in one book is simply too much at once. These are better as weekly musings, as they were originally published.

[Andrea]

love Cockburn, but let's be honest--he hates everyone.