Things Worth Fighting for: Collected Writings

I have been a fan of Michael Kelly since I first discovered him in the pages of the New Republic back in the early nineties. He was that rarest of pundit/journalists. He was a man profoundly interested in truth and profoundly disgusted by modern ?spin.? Although a moderate liberal by birthright and inclination, Kelly found himself moving further and further from the reservation as the Clinton years proceeded. Kelly eventually... Read Full Review

Michael Kelly, Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings, is a compilation of works written by Kelly over a period of about fifteen years. I had not read any of his columns or essays before reading this book and, indeed, barely paid much attention to the announcement of his death covering the Iraq War as an embedded journalist. That was to my own detriment, as I think, after having devoured these essays, I would have enjoyed... Read Full Review

The review from the "Reader from LA" had so many typos that one suspects it was written by Barbra Streisand and should be treated accordingly, but as someone who was inspired by Michael Kelly to go to Afghanistan, I would like to point out that Saddam Hussein was a genocidal maniac and if it was not right to overthrow him, it was not right to overthrow anyone. More than 300,000 graves have been found so far, many of them infants... Read Full Review

This is a remarkable book. Having Michael Kelly?s essays and columns together in a single volume is a treasure. Reading them together, seeing themes developed in a way that was not visible when the essays came out individually, gives them an extraordinary cumulative power.There are essays in this volume that are worth the entire book, including Kelly?s two-page essay on the degeneration of political protest (?Imitation Activism?),... Read Full Review

Michael Kelly spared no words, not even "fighting words," when he was writing with that righteous fervor about something he saw that was wrong. I so looked forward to Wednesdays when his column would run in the Washington Post, with a perspective that was fresh and articulate, and which skewered the "political correctness" and conventional wisdom which surround us. His book about the 1st US/Iraq war, Martyr's Day, of which... Read Full Review