Washington Read

Kinsley in TNR. Hilarity ensues. There's really not what you'd call a quotable moment here, so I'll just quote this:

Excited, I borrowed a copy of the book and gave it a "Washington read." That means looking yourself up in the index. It's best to find a copy you can peruse in private. You can do your Washington read in a bookstore, but it's tricky. People can see you pathetically scanning for your name and, even more pathetically, not finding it. And OK, fair enough, why on earth would you be in the index of a history of medieval France? Answer: for the same reason you might be in any book--i.e., no reason at all. Unless, of course, you are Henry Kissinger, in which case virtually every book published in the past few decades, if it contains an index at all, devotes several lines of it to references to you. The contrast between Kissinger and everyone else in this regard is a special burden on those of us who share Kissinger's neighborhood in alphabetical order. At least Zbigniew Brzezinski is spared this. But remind me to bomb Hanoi in my next life.

Even more important than checking to see if you're in the index is checking to see if you're in the acknowledgments. By the latter metric, I am, in fact, in a book on French history, albeit not medieval French history.