The Moonie Times Loves Reverend Moon. Hold the Front Page!

Sometimes you have to pity Literary Editors. Or, to put it another way, one of life’s small pleasures is seeing how newspapers review books written by their own proprietors. I always thought the Telegraph should just have asked Conrad Black to review his own books and like to think that he’d have done it well. By which I mean he’d have done it entertainingly.

But pity poor Carol Herman, literary editor* of the Washington Times. Sensibly, I think, she must have concluded that asking an outside reviewer to write a notice for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s autobiography would risk trouble. Nobly, then, she took one for the team and gave the paper’s founder and owner the respect he properly deserves:

Faith, family, freedom and service are the pillars of the Rev. Moon’s worldview and work. Through this canvas of often dramatic incidents and his personal observations, this reader came away with a better understanding of the Rev.