STET, Damnit! The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002
Florence King
Hardcover
(National Review Books, March 15, 2003)
Florence King is back–in a big, hardcover book that will warm the cockles of every conservative, libertarian, and just-plain-cynical heart.STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991 to 2002 lets you relive and relish the unsurpassed prose of one of America’s most heralded writers. Word for word, no one punched with the force of Miss King’s clock-cleaning verbiage! During her National Review tenure, no one but no one better expressed what was on our minds, as Florence derided dunderheads, disemboweled sacred cows, trashed trends, and lampooned the lame-brained. For over a decade her wise words were the proverbial two-by-four that smacked upside the thick and dense heads of busybodies, chin-droolers, feel-gooders, store-greeters, plagiarists, teddy-bear memorializers, whiners, wanna-be victims, crisis-counseling apostles, and many more of society’s more annoying types.Now all that crackling prose, all that slashing, burning, vim, vigor, and verbal vinegar that made Florence King and “The Misanthrope’s Corner” a must-read has been collected — every single enjoyable, nincompoop-poohing word — in STET, Damnit! This handsome hardcover edition contains 524 pages of 200-proof pure-grain Florence, distilling every word from every column (including the typos we let slip through in the originals!) that the Mother of All Curmudgeons wrote for her revered National Review column. Florence’s back-page masterpieces still resound and reverberate — even a dozen years later, no matter how “dated” the topic, Miss King’s magic still dazzles. Her unorthodox and unexpected take on a sweeping array of subjects — politics, fads, court rulings, murderesses, scandals, recounts, you name it — remains crisp, fresh, insightful, intelligent, engaging, and always entertaining. The prose still snaps — and the terrible swift pen still slashes.