Andrew Klavan, hereinafter to be known as The Hated Competition (THC), because he has treacherously and spitefully arranged for his new book to come out at about the same time as my new book (called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea), nevertheless has some things to say worth reading in the second half of his interview with John Nolte over at Big Hollywood. In response to a question about how much easier leftists have it in the entertainment world, he replies:

Yes, it is easier for them that way. But it’s harder for them too because they’re talking absolute nonsense and we’re telling the simple truth: that liberty is a great good and worth defending, that right is right and wrong is wrong and moral relativity is merely a form of cowardice, that the individual is more important than the state, that our rights come from our Creator. See, they can attack us, try to silence us, maybe crush us-but they can’t beat us because we’re right and they’re wrong. The truth is not so coincidentally a lot like Jesus, dude. You mock it, you torture it, you kill it-and yet there it stands. I try not to worry about what they “allow,” or what they say is permissable. I try to hitch my wagon to the truth and hold on.

But enough of THC. You want to know the latest news about my book (called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea).

I got a .pdf of what is apparently the final cover tonight. It looks to me as if, after all the sturm und drang, the artist pretty much got everything he wanted. Which is a lesson to us all, I guess.

The book is called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea. I’ll post the art as soon as I’m cleared to do so.

Andrew Klavan’s new Young Adult novel, The Last Thing I Remember, will be released by Thomas Nelson on April 28, according to this interview (Part 1) over at Big Hollywood.

This naturally raises an interesting dilemma for you, the discerning but budget-savvy consumer.

Because my novel, West Oversea, is scheduled for release this month, too. (Or in May anyway. June at the latest.)

So where do you spend your hard-earned book-buying dollar?

I’ll make it easy for you. Buy my book. For the following comprehensive, compelling reasons.

1) Andrew Klavan is already famous. I’m still behind Thorstein Veblen in the list of famous people who grew up in Kenyon, Minnesota. And I’m getting old.

2) Klavan is bald. I have a handsome, thick head of healthy gray hair. The implications should be obvious.

3) Klavan’s book will come out in paperback eventually. Mine will be paperback from the git-go.

I rest my case.

Megan Cox Gurdon writes about eco-propoganda drowning our children.

Contemporary children are so drenched with eco-propaganda that it’s almost a waste of resources. Like acid rain, but more persistent and corrosive, it dribbles down on them all day long. They get it at school, where recycling now competes with tolerance as man’s highest virtue. They get it in peppy “go green” messages online, on television and in magazines. And increasingly, the eco-message is seeping into the pages of novels that don’t, on their face, necessarily seem to be about environmentalism at all. . . .

Thus we have the spectacle of a 12-year-old becoming distraught when her father orders seared tuna at a restaurant (this happened to a friend of mine), on account of over-fishing, or a 6-year-old (son of an acquaintance) panicking at the prospect of even a yogurt container going into the trash: “But I can use it as a toy!”

Oh my soul. For balance sake, I know a child who asked to have a pink pocket knife to go with her pink rifle, so that when she shoots a deer (or whatever animal) she can clean it. She’s a good, little reader too, so no snarking at her. (HT: Loren Eaton)