Fools' Names, Fools' Faces

by Andrew Ferguson

What do Bill Bennett and James Carville, Louis Farrakhan and Gennifer Flowers, Don Imus and Bill Moyers have in common? They all wish Andrew Ferguson had never heard of them. For ten years, Ferguson has prowled the fever swamps of American celebrity in search of frauds and mountebanks, and he has not been disappointed. No one who reads his jaundiced treatments of Robert McNamara, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and a dozen other cultural icons will ever look at them in quite the same way.

Genres: Politics, Essays, Nonfiction, History

213 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and has written and editor for many publications, including Washingtonian magazine, Time magazine, Fortune, TV Guide, Forbes FYI, National Review, Bloomberg News, Commentary, the New Yorker, New York magazine, the New Republic, the American Spectator, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and many other publications. In 1992, he was a White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written mainly in the 1990s, Ferguson's insights and chronicling of the times in America are just as pertinent today, if not more so, simply for the author's blatant, unabashed sanity.

Ferguson's antennae pick up the telling words and actions that give away his subjects' true motives and concerns in these brilliant pieces. It’s become a lost art. We see the beginnings of the entrenchment of the celebrity as mouthpiece for leftist causes, Barbra Streisand being still at it, and join the New Age globalists in conference: Jane Fonda sneaks out of a Mikael Gorbachev speech; Ted Turner checks news about his wealth while an African leader speaks of the poor being left behind in the world of new technology. The Gennifer Flowers piece is a standout and speaks volumes. Compare Ferguson’s experience of the heady early days of cyberspace and corporate diversity training to their insatiable interference in our lives today. Find out how many other Presidents skipped the Press Correspondents Dinner and why it is the right thing to do.

This book isn’t dated, it’s prescient.

The introduction by P J O'Rourke sums the Me generation up succinctly - or is it the Me eon? he asks. Since we're feeling the effects with great force entering the third decade of the 21st century, I think we know which. Reading this collection, bought secondhand online and shipped to the other side of the world, is for me an antidote to the destructive, cognitively dissonant behaviour we are currently witnessing worldwide, where the truth is not allowed to get in the way of the woke narrative. Give me the sharp, wry, laugh-out-loud funny Andrew Ferguson forever.

[Bryan Metzger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this at the recommendation of a friend. Funny, feel like I learned a decent amount about what politics and Washington felt like in the late 80s/90s, somewhat inspirational in terms of magazine writing.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite good.

[Koeeoaddi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dated now, but there's a hilarious essay on Donald Trump.