With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy

This is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. If you have had too much PC or have had it up to here with cloying sentimentality, or you just had too much "other people", get this book. If you like Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, Grouch Marx, etc., you will love this book. Miss King spares no one and pulls no punches.

How can a book about misanthropy be joyful and life-affirming? Because Florence lets you know you're not alone. It can be pretty discouraging when everyone you know wants you to smile and be optimistic at all costs. Florence's devastations of the incompetent are the very definition of "catharsis." Mencken, whereever he is, must be green with envy.

This book has more truth in it than almost any other I've ever read. The definitive work on "the damned human race." King is like Kurt Vonnegut, if Vonnegut would lay off the sentimentality and say what he *really* thinks. Absolutely hilarious.

Florence King is brilliant, she is one of my all time favorite people. It's unjust to characterize her narrowly as an author or commentator or critic... therefore the all inclusive "people." In a perfect world, she would live on one side of me and Camille Paglia on the other, and P. J. O'Rourke would drop by often and I would just sit and listen to them. Like Ms. Paglia, Miss King arrows right past the phoney facades and self justifications too many of us use and lays bare the basic hypocrisy most of us disguise as deep concern and high principle. No self serving politician would dare presume to "feel her pain," she'd snap him off at the ankles and rightly so. In her acerbic prose and painfully accurate observations is a simple creed: leave people alone, don't meddle, and don't claim higher motives than you in fact possess. She is a libertarian in the best possible sense, in the "Mind your own business, keep your hands to yourself" mode proposed by P. J. O'Rourke. Plus, she's funnier than a... oh, I don't know, it would depend on how much you valued whichever particular ox she was goring. Actually, I suppose we can be glad so many of us are pompous, self serving frauds, or else we'd be deprived of the delight in watching Miss King deftly and mercilessly dissect (vivisect?) such humbugs. She's in no danger of running out of material, let's just hope she doesn't get tired of exploiting it.

Miss King's most cogent point about misanthropes might be missed if the reader revels only in the humor of With Charity Toward None: Misanthropes are truly the humanitarian sort. With the exception of Rousseau, most of them mind their own business and leave well enough alone. They also "live and let live" in the truest spirit. What a blessing if the rest of the "altruistic", "people-person" types would only do the same. Miss King presents an unexpected primer on how to treat people by using the inversion of the expected lessons on doing good for others.