The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read this book. This isn’t quite as glib an observation as it sounds. Cohen’s central point is that the censors’ pens did not fall down with the Berlin Wall. And yet here he is, very obviously free to tell us about them.
Cohen is a rambunctious pessimist. His style involves mustering a degree of anger for a page or two, often through an outrage only loosely connected to the matter at hand (Islam’s treatment of women, segregation in the Deep South, the crimes of Roman Polanski, for example) and then, once the wheels of our righteous indignation are drawn back to the point where they start clicking, he lets go, and lets rip, and woof, it’s awesome.
Strictly speaking there are three essays here.
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