January 10, 2023, 8:29am
As someone in the throes of the humiliating exercise that is asking writers you admire to read your book and write nice things about it, I almost empathize with Mike Pompeo. In case you forgot (guilty!), Pompeo served as both the director of the CIA and Secretary of State under Trump, and his forthcoming book, Never Give and Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, “reads like a thriller” (according to Mike Pompeo).
That’s right: Mike Pompeo has absolutely revolutionized blurbing by dispensing with the embarrassing asks and simply… blurbing himself.
This might be the most hilarious book blurb I’ve ever seen.
Really embarrassing @mikepompeo couldn’t find ANYONE else to praise his book. pic.twitter.com/1qPBOsG5ck
— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) January 9, 2023
The blurb—”My new book reads like a thriller with stories from my heart”—doesn’t appear on publisher’s website, probably because they have slightly more shame than “Champion American Values,” the PAC (chaired by… Mike Pompeo!) that bankrolled the full-page age in what looks to be some kind of catalogue of Republicans? Of whom not one would offer this man a blurb?
Okay, yes, this is objectively both hilarious and embarrassing, but also… asking for blurbs is really terrible, so maybe we should all cut Mike Pompeo, blurb innovator, a little slack! (But only about this—not about anything else.)