I’m 100 pages into the Bush memoir, and I’m loving it.

When I say this to my friends, this response usually follows: “Guess he had a good ghostwriter!” Or something like that.

I can’t discount the possibility that somebody helped Bush write the book (or the possibility that somebody wrote the book for Bush). But I sure haven’t seen the evidence. Nor, really, has anybody. It’s all speculation.

I can see where my friends are coming from. After all, Bush sure didn’t have the eloquence of Clinton or Obama. But books, my former editor Scott Dickensheets points out, are different than speeches: “Speech is an improvisational act, unfolding in the moment. Writing is reflective; you have time to polish.” (I should point out: I don’t know whether Scott has made up his mind about whether Bush wrote the memoir himself; Scott was speaking in general terms.)

Bush has had two years to write and polish Decision Points. And by all accounts—his own, especially—he’s spent a lot of time doing just that. So why is it so crazy to believe the book is significantly cleaner than Bush’s speeches and debate performances?

I contacted linguist Geoffrey Nunberg and asked him these two questions: Isn't it possible that somebody who speaks, uh, as Bush speaks, would be capable of writing a good book with clean prose? Surely there are some precedents for this...(clumsy speakers writing eloquent books...), right?

And here’s what Nunberg had to say: I can't think of too many, but then Bush isn't alone. Most presidents had help—except Jimmy Carter; the question is, how much? Eisenhower was a much more fluent writer than a speaker, for example—you can tell this from his letters—but he apparently had some help on Crusade in Europe.

Maybe we can all agree on these two things: 1) It’s not a big deal if Bush got some help with this book. Most Presidents get help. 2) We’ll never know how much help Bush got.

Agree or disagree, until more evidence comes out, I’m giving the guy the benefit of the doubt on this one. And, as Las Vegas Weekly’s book reviewer, I’m doing everything I can to evaluate the book and not the politics of the guy who wrote it.

And what about my upcoming book, Fool Me Once: Hustlers, Hookers, Headliners, and How Not to Get Screwed in Vegas? Who really wrote it?

Bush did.

This is so frustrating! Kirkus just posted a review of Fool Me Once, but I can't read it because I don't have a Kirkus account. All I can read is the first two lines, which say... "Fear and loathing is in short supply, but there are plenty of cons and cheap hustles in this lively memoir of time spent on the seamier edge of Casinoland. Hunter Thompson it ain’t, and that’s refreshing for a book about..." And that's all I can read. :/

This week I reviewed the first 62 pages of Glenn Beck's new book Common Sense. You can read the full review in this week's Las Vegas Weekly by clicking HERE...and you can read the intro below:

Glenn Beck is great on TV; he shouts, he scoffs, and he cries. But when he writes, when his words are stripped clean of the paint-by-numbers, manufactured emotion that television facilitates, one thing becomes clear: The man has absolutely nothing of consequence to say.

Beck uses every trick in the book to cover this up. He uses more exclamation points than a teenage girl with unlimited texts (e.g., “Open your eyes!” “They’re not rescuing our country; they’re destroying it!”), and more capital letters than a teenage boy writing his first quasi-communist manifesto (e.g., “HISTORY DEMANDS A CLEAR ANSWER.”) But try as he might, Beck can’t turn a paperback book into a flat-screen TV.

Here’s a good example of the type of sentence that might fly on The Glenn Beck Program, but doesn’t hold water in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Governmen: “The result of preventing failure in a country rooted in freedom is a country that is no longer rooted in logic.”

That sentence would make my undergrad philosophy professor vomit in his mouth. Does Beck actually believe that preventing failure—in all cases, Glenn?—would somehow disengage America from the laws of Boolean logic? Of course not; to paraphrase a Mr. Show sketch, Glenn Beck doesn’t understand what words mean. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.

This week I reviewed Russell Brand's My Booky Wook in Las Vegas Weekly. Check out LasVegasWeekly.com for the full review....but here's a tease:

Russell Brand is huge in Europe, but you probably just know him as the hypersexual rock star Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall or the skinny British guy who hosted the 2008 MTV Movie Awards. Well, there’s something else you should know about Russell Brand: The man can write.

His new memoir, My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up, leaves no doubt about why he was cast as Aldous Snow; Brand has a serious sex addiction. If that sounds silly to you—the idea that someone can be addicted to sex—listen to the way the author describes a family vacation to Thailand: “I fucked loads more prostitutes; always got a hard-on, never wore a condom, and never fell in love.”

The first half of Brand’s booky wook details how he developed this addiction. As you can imagine, it began early on: “Another dubious attention-seeking device that I invented at school was the game ‘genital-grabbing,’ which is very simple and easy to play but fraught with dreadful connotations for its participants and severe vilification for its unwitting inventor.”

Brand describes so many sexual trysts that when he mentions getting a dog with whom he shared his bed, he feels the need to make clear that the two never had sex: “I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of that relationship—not platonic in the purist sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn’t fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.”