Mock memoir a known known for Rumsfeld

Subject: Mock memoir a known known for Rumsfeld Tue Jan 11, 2011 7:12 pm

WHEN it comes to telling the story of Donald Rumsfeld's life, facts have often seemed stranger than fiction. And now readers will be given the choice between the two, when a novel depicting the abduction of the former US defence secretary is published next month - on the same day as his own political memoir.

Mr Rumsfeld's book, Known and Unknown, is out in America on February 8 and is said by its publisher, Penguin, to ''pull no punches'' in its inside look at the Bush administration, September 11 and the Iraq war.

Its title refers to the infamous comment, criticised by many as gobbledegook, the defence secretary made at a 2002 NATO news conference concerning the absence of evidence that Iraq was supplying terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
Advertisement: Story continues below

''Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know,'' Mr Rumsfeld said.

The 78-year-old's memoir will offer ''previously undisclosed details'' about the Bush years, says Penguin, and his ''often surprising'' observations on his experiences through many decades of political life. He was defence secretary under Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s, before being reappointed to the role under George Bush in 2001, and holds records as the youngest and the oldest person to take the post.

But thee experimental US publisher McSweeney's, founded by the novelist Dave Eggers, is responding to news of the memoir by bringing out a darkly satirical novel, Donald, on the same date. The book, by Stephen Elliott and Eric Martin, is described on a Washington Post blog as ''a breakneck thriller … rooted in the harrowing stories of real people caught in America's disastrous military campaigns''.

In Donald Mr Rumsfeld receives a taste of his own medicine: abducted from his Maryland home, drugged, stripped and dressed in a nappy, and thereafter held without charges in his own prison system, denied a trial and located beyond the reach of law, where no one can find him. The cover features Mr Rumsfeld in a typically confident pose similar to that which adorns his memoir, but wearing a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit.

The move mirrors that of OR Books in 2009, which published an essay collection, Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare on the same day that Ms Palin's memoir Going Rogue came out.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/mock-memoir-a-known-known-for-rumsfeld-20110111-19msk.html

Mock memoir a known known for Rumsfeld

Mock memoir a known known for Rumsfeld

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

Inside AnCaps, Philosophy, Libertarians & Ancapdemia's Ebony Basement