I don’t actually need to, but I want to. I wrote about it here

So, why do I want to distance myself from it?

I finally finished the book. I have a tendency leave books half-read because of… things. Mostly I’m not just very organized about my reading outside of my work, so I just tend to have a lot of unfinished books lying around.

This is what I said about the book in the article linked above:

This is a collection of bad people from history. The name implies certain amount of fun, but most of the twelve people profiled here are kind of horrific. Still, usable information when building interesting characters for RPG purposes. And it is still a very good book.

Now, the last chapter was about Anthony Bourdain and he was not a bad guy, so what I said about the book is not really true in my mind anymore (I guess my recollection of the book was also somewhat false, as many of the chapters are actually about someone trying to find the bad guy).

What really bugged me about the Bourdain chapter was this: Bourdain had weird feuds or beefs with various people, mostly chefs and food critics. He would often make peace with these people. However, he also made some incendiary comments about Kissinger (see this tweet for an example) and in the book Keefe asks Bourdain whether he would be willing to make peace with Kissinger.

Bourdain, being a man with a brain, unlike Keefe, has more strong words on this. “Fuck Kissinger.” And yes, fuck Kissinger. His current cultural role is to be the example of why there is no need to respect the dead, which is an accomplishment on it’s own.

So, how can I now take the book seriously, when the author is so fucking stupid that he thinks making peace with fucking Kissinger is the same thing as making peace with some food critic you disagreed with? What kind of a pill do you need to take to get into that kind of a mindset? I mean, fuck Kissinger.

Bourdain travelled a lot and he went to Cambodia as well. While travelling there, he could see the lingering effects of Kissinger’s terror campaigns. How can any human think that you can dismiss that in the same way you can dismiss an opinion on food you didn’t agree with? Getting there requires such a level of mental gymnastics that we simply can’t trust anything Keefe says anymore. Rational people with any kind of sympathy for other human beings don’t think like this.

Fuck Kissinger and since Keefe apparently thinks Kisssinger was worthy of some kind of redemption, fuck him as well.