Hawk-faced elderly man James Brady, the name-dropping veteran of 600 media outlets who has now eased into his retirement job as Forbes' "media columnist" (ha), is primarily skilled at being befuddled about the point of things (though he hasn't lost his name-dropping talent). So faced with an early copy of former crackhead-turned Times columnist David Carr's (well-reviewed) new book-which is not, as Brady hoped, a volume of media name-dropping-Brady panics in print like the senile Uncle Junior in The Sopranos: shoot the bad man and run hide in the closet! See, Brady really wanted this book to be a recitation by Carr of media inside-baseball stuff. "What a glorious read that would be, and what a column or two I could get out of it," he writes. But no-it's full of drug shit!

Set against Carr, Dostoevsky was a bundle of laughs, The Lost Weekend a riot, Nelson Algren's fictional "Frankie Machine" a hail fellow well met... Fine, the man's a writer, and I want books to sell and be read. Just not this one, not by me.

But will you look at that: Brady still managed to get an entire column out of how he won't read this book! The man is a pro. Don't worry Jim, you can read this instead. [Forbes]