Who doesn't love a tasty skewer of roasted author, now and then?

Despite its thrilling material, “Kingmakers” gets off to a slow start. Although Meyer and Brysac are strong on the texture and detail of historical events, they simply do not appear to be very interested in the early part of their story about British imperialism. The first few chapters are a patchwork of glamorous and entertaining anecdotes without much to hold them together. The authors stray into lengthy digressions, some of which — like a five-page diversion into the filming of “Lawrence of Arabia” — tend to have the same effect on the flow of their story as Lawrence’s bombs had on the Ottoman railways.

These weak chapters show up the worst of Meyer and Brysac’s writing style, which is sometimes pretentious to the point of incomprehensibility and becomes more so when they seem to lack interest in their subject matter. The thesaurus takes a battering: Meyer and Brysac will not have half of something if they can have a moiety; they will not give a gift if they can give a lagniappe; they will not quote a saying if they can quote an apothegm.

Sometimes it’s almost impossible to make out what they mean, as when Gladstone is said to have “habitually lofted oratorical rockets into the unassailable empyrean,” when all the poor man actually did was to answer a few questions. Or when the British agent St. John Philby is said “to glare at the world through his owlish shrubbery.” What is owlish shrubbery? A shrubbery full of owls? A shrubbery shaped like an owl? A prop from Monty Python? As to what glaring through such a thing might signify, this reviewer is at a loss to imagine.

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The book is subtly subtitled “A Novel of December 8th” to signal its attention to the Japanese point of view. On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”

And you would be spectacularly wrong. Because you would 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.

From the archive:

And yes, it's also true that whenever Gingrich utters the word "frankly," the words that follow almost always involve rank deception. And frankly, he says "frankly" a lot.