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James Lipton memoir: worst book evah?

The U.S. publishing house Dutton is about to release a memoir by James Lipton – host of Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio – and the folks at Gawker have already proclaimed it possibly the “most gloriously horrendous book ever written”:

You have to love a man who starts the memoir of his middle-brow career with an epigraph by Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”

For anyone who isn’t familiar with him, Lipton is that celebrity interviewer with the pretentiously pointy beard and irksomely wire-rimmed glasses, the one who sits on a New York theatre stage with, say, Sally Field, asking her to elucidate the socio-political meanings of The Flying Nun. According to Amazon, Lipton’s other major book is a 1968 reference title called An Exaltation of Larks, which pretty much says it all. For a more trenchant critique of Lipton’s peculiarly irritating manner, however, see this Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Will Farrell.

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