Endorsements

A while ago- around 2000 - I was collecting (well, not seriously; just buying them when I came across them cheap) American novels about the coming war with China, just to watch the pressure building up. Now I see my first example of the novels about the new war with the moslems; Prayers for the Assassin, by Robert Ferrigno (2006).

Really, all that one needs to know about the details of the book is that when the back cover quotes the Guardian as saying"I can confidently predict that Prayers for the Assassin will be a resounding success" that is extracted from this;
"Ferrigno can't be bothered to get the basics of nuclear weaponry right, let alone do justice to the implications of his main conceit. He acknowledges as sources six Islamic websites, one book and two articles, and if this was the extent of his research it's hardly surprising that the result is a pile of lamentable clichés and half-imagined characters, strung together in a plot of such hopeless absurdity that it's all but impossible to follow. In this the book compares favourably to that other bestseller, the war on terror, sold so well to the citizens of the United States over the past few years. Given that Ferrigno has taken all the prejudices and idiocies of that narrative and shovelled them between cardboard covers, I can confidently predict that Prayers for the Assassin will be a resounding success."

It's the book's existence, not its merits, that counts. And it's probably significant that I got in in a large print edition, suitable for the prejudices of the elderly.