“Filleting the silliest man on the planet needs a sure scalpel, and Belén Fernández wields hers with deadly finesse.”—Alexander Cockburn, editor of CounterPunch
“The Imperial Messenger is a superb dissection of the character of Thomas Friedman, and all the representations he snootily imitates. Belén Fernández’s style is witty and unique, and her book is the antithesis of Friedman’s various attempts at logic.”—Ramzy Baroud, author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story
“Belén Fernández is a revelation to those who don’t know her yet and a confirmation for those happy few who have known her sublime sense of political satire—subdued, innocent, piercing, frightful. She is a political satirist of the Generation X vintage—low-key, self-effacing, happenstance, ‘what-ever’-type who crawls under your skin and begins to tickle and before you know it bite. She insinuates so effortlessly, you think she is just chilling—she is not. Her book on Thomas Friedman is an act of restitution, a declaration of independence from a young, idealist, brave, and defiant generation of Americans who have had it up to here with barefaced banality that has been fed to them for too long. She is talking back—boldly, patiently, chapter and verse, going in for the kill.”—Hamid Dabashi, author of Iran, the Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox
“A long overdue takedown of a dangerous fraud. Fernández deserves great credit for having the stomach to digest all of Friedman’s oeuvre and for her witty, fact-based and ruthless deconstruction of all his contradictions, incoherence, jingoism and inane aphorisms. You read it and you are amazed how a clown could rise to such dominance in American culture and how such drivel could pass for insight, and what that implies about us. The book is a vaccination that should be given to all college freshmen lest they too get infected, an antidote for those suffering from admiration of Friedman and a palliative remedy for those of us who have had aneurysms in reaction to his every latest bloviation.”—Nir Rosen, author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World
“Via razor sharp analysis and meticulous research, Fernández reveals the consistently disastrous effects of the neoliberal policies Friedman cheerleads. The hubris, sophistry, consistent hypocrisy, and buffoonery of the New York Times’s most widely read columnist is systematically deconstructed and laid bare. A must-read.”—Dahr Jamail, journalist and author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq
