Cohen's book arrives
Nick Cohen's tome has arrived courtesy of Amazon, and I can confirm that the excerpt in The Observer is correct - he does invent a dedication by Azar Nafisi to Paul Wolfowitz. The actual text goes further - it is on the "title page" so he's clearly not referring to the acknowledgement, and he declares it a dedication.A cryptic dedication on the title page of Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir published by Iranian feminist Azar Nafisi in 2003, encapsulated how warped the liberal left had become..Once she would have seen the liberal left as her natural ally - she was fighting for its principles, after all. But Reading Lolita in Tehran was dedicated 'to Paul' [Wolfowitz]
This really raises questions about Cohen's research. Has he actually read the book? It seems highly unlikely that he would have read the book, and independently of Christopher Hitchens, made the same mistake as Hitchens. But then again if he had read the book because he read Christopher Hitchens, surely he would have realised it was not dedicated to "Paul", nor that it was on the "title page"?
Anyway, on his website he is still making the untrue claim. Perhaps the dinner guests were silenced by the audacity of the claim?
Once, when book editors were heaping deserved praise on Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s poignant account of educated women suffering under the Iranian mullahs, I managed to silence a literary dinner party for the first and I suspect only time in my life by asking if they realised the ‘Paul’ Nafisi had dedicated her book to was Paul Wolfowitz.
Labels: Nick Cohen
posted by Matthew @ 1/23/2007 05:44:00 PM
Comments: 0
