Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me stipulate that Before The Fall was a thoughtful and at times compelling read. The story concerns itself with the ill-fated flight of a private jet with two families aboard, along with the central character, a struggling artist, who finds his life and that of a four year old boy irrevocably altered when the jet plunges into the Long Island Sound. The narrative unfolds as a brooding meditation on fate and the finality of death amid our unforgiving celebrity media culture and the 24 hour news cycle. Just as the plane falls from the sky, this story falls from grace when the author finds himself unable to resist launching a broad, ham-fisted swipe at Fox News. Fox News and its ascendence to the top of the ratings has time and again brought out the worst in the liberal progressive intelligentsia, and Mr. Hawley proves he too suffers from FDS, Fox News derangement syndrome. The syndrome manifests itself in a number of ways in Before The Fall. The thinly veiled ALC News a stand in for Fox News channel. Shock news host Bill Cunningham an every more thinly veiled stand in for Bill O'Reilly. The author even went so far as to name Cunningham's attorney "Franken," a taunt at the long-running feud between O'Reilly and the one time SNL comedian Al Franken. In Hawley's story, the Cunningham character is painted as an egotistical, manipulative and even dangerous buffoon, engaging in all manner of ethically corrupt and even illegal behavior to get at the TV host's version of the truth. Every liberal prejudice about Fox News and every tired myth the FDS afflicted suffer from comes rushing forth. There have been great novels in our time that have dealt with our celebrity media culture. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire Of The Vanities comes to mind. Where Wolfe paints with deft, satirical embellishments, Hawley slashes in crude cartoonish strokes. It's sad, really, because Mr. Hawley is clearly a writer of the first rank. The Fox News angle and the O'Reilly component came off as petty and mean-spirited. As if the writer has a score to settle. But that's what Fox News success does to liberal elites. They simply can't help themselves.