Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion

Brinkley brings his bracing wit and journalistic acumen to this selection of his brief closing commentaries delivered over the last 15 years of his Sunday morning ABC-TV news program, This Week with David Brinkley. He skewers Washington's lingo of cover-up and denial, satirizes Clinton's defeated health care plan and blasts Japan for its resistance to imports. His rogues' gallery includes Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Libyan dictator Muammar Khadafy, Haiti's deposed Duvalier clan and North Korea's Kim Jong Il. Many of these 180 mini-essays, each a page in length or less, topple easy targets, such as lax airline safety standards or self-aggrandizing government bureaucracies. Other pieces comment amusingly on the annoyances of modern life or on the odd or the bizarre--e.g., castles for sale in East Germany, longhorn cattle bolting from a California rodeo to push into a bank's front door. Although Brinkley is a formidable foe of cant and hypocrisy, too many of these pieces seem dated or work better on the tube than on the printed page. 250,000 first printing; available in large print and on audio cassette. (Oct.)