Get Thee to Bugmenot!

Go on. It's easy. Borrow one of their New York Times logins, because you really must go read this review of the new Newt Gingrich (and William R. Forstchen) novel, Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th:

An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.

[Y]ou [will] find phrases like “to withdraw backward was impossible,” sounds like “wretching noises” to accompany vomiting, or constructions like “incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted.” Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. “One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or, presumably, the reader’s.

Go read the whole thing!

It's really entertaining. (And I'm not saying this because of Gingrich's political history. Although that makes this all the more delicious!)