Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education

By Lanny J. Davis

On a November afternoon in 1996, Lanny Davis got a phone call that would change his life. It was from a top aide at the White House, asking him if he was interested in joining the president's senior staff. Within a few short weeks he had signed on as special counsel to the president. Fourteen months later, his tour of duty almost over, he got another phone call, this time from a Washington Post reporter who asked, "Have you ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky?"
In the time between those two phone calls, Davis received an extraordinary political education. As President Bill Clinton's chief spokesman for handling "scandal matters" he had the unenviable job of briefing reporters and answering their pointed questions on the most embarrassing allegations against the president and his aides, from charges of renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, to stories of selling plots in Arlington Cemetery, from irregular campaign fundraising to sexual improprieties. He was the White House's first line of defense against the press corps and the reporters' first point of entry to an increasingly reticent administration. His delicate task was to remain credible to both sides while surviving the inevitable crossfire.
Upon entering the White House, Davis discovered that he was never going to be able to turn bad news into good news, but he could place the bad news in its proper context and work with reporters to present a fuller picture. While some in the White House grew increasingly leery of helping a press corps that they regarded as hostile, Davis moved in the opposite direction, pitching unfavorable stories to reporters and helping them garner the facts to write those stories accurately. Most surprisingly of all, he realized that to do his job properly, he sometimes had to turn himself into a reporter within the White House, interviewing his colleagues and ferreting out information. Along the way, he learned the true lessons of why politicians, lawyers, and reporters so often act at cross-purposes and gained some remarkable and counterintuitive insights into why this need not be the case. Searching out the facts wherever he could find them, even if he had to proceed covertly, Davis discovered that he could simultaneously help the reporters do their jobs and not put the president in legal or political jeopardy.
With refreshing candor, Davis admits his own mistakes and reveals those instances where he dug a deeper hole for himself by denying the obvious and obfuscating the truth. And in a powerful reassessment of the scandal that led to the president's impeachment, Davis suggests that if the White House had been more receptive to these same hard-won lessons, the Monica Lewinsky story might not have come so close to bringing down an otherwise popular president. For as Davis learned above all, you can always make a bad story better by telling it early, telling it all, and telling it yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Free Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 1999
• ISBN: 9780684864136

Lanny J. Davis

Lanny J. Davis is a lawyer who counsels individuals, corporations, and others on crisis management and legal issues. He served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton and was a spokesperson for the president and the White House on matters concerning campaign finance investigations and other legal issues. In 2005 President George W. Bush appointed Davis to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by the U.S. Congress as part of the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act. He graduated from Yale Law School, where he won the prestigious Thurman Arnold Moot Court prize and served on the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of The Unmaking of the President 2016.

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THE FREE PRESS A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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Copyright © 1999 by Lanny J. Davis

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

THE FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

ISBN 0-684-86413-4

eISBN: 978-0-684-86413-6

To my wife, Carolyn, who made it all possible, and who speaks the truth, early, all, and herself.

Contents

Prologue:

The Monica Lewinsky Story: The First Ten Days

1 Whose Side Are You On?

2 Making Waves

3 Two Plus Two Equals Five

4 Shocked, Shocked

5 Unconnecting the Dots

6 Invisible Skeletons

7 Been There, Done That

8 Nunsense

9 Dead Men Do Tell Tales

Epilogue:

The Monica Lewinsky Story: In Retrospect

Acknowledgments

Index

Author’s Note

THIS BOOK DERIVES FROM MY EXPERIENCES WORKING IN THE White House. Other than transcriptions of press briefings and television appearances, the incidents and conversations recounted—whether through description, paraphrase, or reconstructed dialogue—are as I best remember them, based on my own personal observation or participation.

Prologue The Monica Lewinsky Story: The First Ten Days

IT WAS ABOUT 9:00 P.M. ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 1998.

I walked through the Secret Service trailer at the northwest gate of the White House for the last time as special counsel to the president. I said goodbye to each of the agents, whom I had come to know pretty well during the previous fourteen months. They were supposed to be completely apolitical, but during my tenure as the White House’s chief spokesman on all scandal issues, they had joshed me each morning and evening about how I was surviving the ordeal. You okay, Mr. Davis? they used to ask me. Don’t let those bastards get you down.

You’re lucky you’re getting out when you are, Mr. Davis, said one.

I wasn’t so sure. I walked outside into the cold night air, thought about those words, and felt a terrible inner conflict. I had come to the White House in December of 1996 because I had been a friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton at Yale Law School and because of my support for President Clinton and his policies. At the White House I worked with the press primarily on the allegations of improper campaign fundraising and on the administration’s response to congressional hearings and investigations on the subject, which by the end of 1997 had basically fizzled out with little lasting damage to the president or his administration.

I had announced my departure in December 1997, primarily because my wife Carolyn was pregnant, and I wanted to spend more time at home with my family. I also was convinced, as I told the president prior to the White House Christmas party when I informed him I planned to leave by the end of January, I think it’s okay for me to return to my law practice, Mr. President, because all the worst scandal stories are behind us.

I guess I was wrong.

THOUGH MOST OF MY DUTIES as a White House spokesman revolved around finance and politics, on one occasion I was asked to comment on a story concerning a possible encounter in the White House between the president and a woman—in this case, a volunteer named Kathleen Willey, who claimed the president had groped her during a visit she had paid to him in late November of 1993.

In early July 1997, a colleague in the White House counsel’s office asked me to call Michael Isikoff of Newsweek magazine to find out, if I could, whether he was working on a story about the president and another woman. I had known Isikoff for many years, from the days when I had been active in Maryland politics and he was a reporter for the Washington Post. He was feisty, with a razor-sharp intellect, and he was relentless if he smelled a good story—especially if he sensed that the target of his reporting was being evasive or disingenuous. Isikoff reportedly had left the Post three years earlier in part because of disagreements with his editors over the news value of his reporting on Paula Jones’s allegations against the president. The Post’s editors had decided that Isikoff’s story was neither substantial nor legitimate enough to run, and he left the paper for a position at Newsweek.

I reached Isikoff at home on a Friday morning, the Fourth of July, and asked him whether he was working on a story about Clinton and another woman. He said, Not right now. I said that was an ambiguous reply. He was silent. He asked me who was asking the question in the White House. I didn’t tell him. I reported the conversation back to the counsel’s office.

The following Monday, someone told me that the Drudge Report—an Internet Web site that focuses almost exclusively on negative rumors and developing negative stories about the Clintons and their allies—had reported that Michael Isikoff was hot on the trail of a story involving a federal employee sexually propositioned by the president on federal property. I subsequently learned that Drudge had posted the allegation on July 4—the very day that I had called Isikoff.

In late July, Isikoff called to inform me that he was about to break a story naming Kathleen Willey as having been involved with the president. I asked him whether this was the same story that Drudge had reported, and why he was going with it now when he hadn’t before. He said cryptically that he had more now than he had before, that there was someone else who might be corroborative. He wanted me to confirm or deny the allegations, but he also seemed worried about my going into a full-court press to try to get an official White House comment, because if I did so the word might get out to one of his competitors. He therefore refused to go into any details as to why he was taking this story seriously. The reporter’s dilemma can be seen here: he needs help and information from a source to complete his story accurately, but he wants to reveal as little as possible so that he doesn’t lose his scoop. In this case, because Isikoff and I had known each other for so many years he knew he could trust me not to deliberately bust his exclusive story.

I went through the motions of trying to check the story out, but given the little information Isikoff had been willing to share with me, I knew I wouldn’t get very far. In fact, no one I spoke to in the counsel’s office or elsewhere was even willing to check out whether someone named Kathleen Willey had ever worked at the White House as a volunteer or otherwise, much less whether the president had had an intimate incident involving her.

I don’t believe I ever called Isikoff back. I just couldn’t take this story seriously. I didn’t understand why Newsweek was crossing the line into alleged private conduct by the president, a line not crossed in previous White Houses. After all, as I understood it from talking to Isikoff, in this instance there was no legal proceeding, no grand jury—and, significantly, Ms. Willey was unwilling to go on record with Isikoff. I wondered: Will Isikoff and Newsweek become the first mainstream national media organization perhaps in U.S. history willing to publish allegations of extramarital sexual activity by a president of the United States without anything else to justify the publication of the story?

After the story broke on August 4, the White House decision was not to comment on it at all, though we had to prepare a response because the president had a press availability scheduled that day or the next. (A press availability, as distinguished from a full-blown press conference, is an event at which the president is performing some official function, such as meeting with a head of state or making an announcement of a policy initiative, and a few questions of the president on unrelated matters are permitted from representatives of the press corps.) Those of us on the White House counsel’s investigations team joined the prep session with the president customarily conducted by press secretary Michael McCurry and other senior White House political advisors. McCurry turned to me and asked whether the Willey story had any significant legs. On the scandal beat, the test of viability of a breaking story is whether other news organizations treat it seriously, get concerned or irritated that they have been beaten, and thus launch their own investigative energies and resources into finding new news to break beyond the original story. The quick shorthand expression to describe this phenomenon is legs; if a story has legs, other news organizations will report it, and sometimes, if it is a huge story, expand on it over additional news cycles. In response to McCurry, I said no, it had no legs, that I had heard from few reporters about it. McCurry turned to the president and asked him a hostile question about the incident—posing, as he usually did at these sessions, as an aggressive reporter. The president smiled and cracked a joke; we all laughed nervously. Then, changing to a serious tone, he denied that the incident alleged by Ms. Willey had ever happened.

When I left the room, I sought guidance from a member of the counsel’s office as to how I should respond to inquiries about the Newsweek report. Just refuse to answer any questions, was the response. This, I knew, was not a useful tactic. If anything, it would infuriate the press and drive them further, perhaps giving legs to the story. I caught up with McCurry after the briefing. He gave me permission, based on the president’s answer, to deny that the Willey incident had ever happened as described by Newsweek—and to do it on background, which meant I could be quoted, but not by name. My words would be attributed instead to an anonymous senior White House official.

It was when I read Isikoff’s story that I first came across the name Linda Tripp. Isikoff identified her as a former Bush White House employee who had worked for a time in the Clinton counsel’s office as an executive assistant to then White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum. Isikoff quoted Tripp as saying that she had seen Willey after she left her meeting with President Clinton, that her lipstick was smeared and her blouse disheveled, and that her demeanor was flustered, happy, and joyful. Tripp, portrayed by Isikoff as trying to be helpful to the White House, said that Willey was not distressed. I remember thinking that there was something disingenuous about Tripp’s motives. Why would she go on record with Isikoff about this incident and how could she consider it helpful to confirm that the incident had occurred—regardless of Willey’s reaction to it?

Robert Bennett, the president’s personal attorney in the Paula Corbin Jones case, apparently also reacted to Tripp’s real motives as I had. He was quoted in the Newsweek story, and on television and in the press, as saying that Linda Tripp was not to be believed and that the incident alleged by Willey had never happened.

I received a flurry of phone calls from reporters about the Willey story, mostly about Linda Tripp and her prior service in the Clinton White House. Again I ran up against a virtual information shutdown within the place as I tried to answer these press inquiries. Attorneys in the counsel’s office who were there at the time she worked as an executive assistant to Nussbaum either said that they did not remember Tripp or would not tell me whether they knew anything about her claim to have some knowledge of the Willey allegations. Several people told me that they knew Tripp to be a fairly active office gossip. Some recalled that during the aftermath of Vincent Foster’s suicide in 1993 (she worked in the same office suite as Foster in the counsel’s office), she was very critical of the way the White House had handled that matter, and had testified at a Senate hearing to that effect.

In any event, the information blackout seemed to work. The Willey story had no legs. We were amazed and delighted. It appeared that we had lucked out for several reasons: the fortuitous timing of a scheduled presidential press conference, permitting Clinton himself to deny the story within days of its publication; Bennett’s quick public slap-down of Linda Tripp; the timing of the story in August, when most press and political people are out of town on vacation; and, most important, the fact that it was just another rumor story about Clinton and sexual liaisons, and the alleged corroboration by Tripp was suspect at best.

So we learned a very important lesson from the Willey episode: ignore or downplay stories about the president’s alleged sexual liaisons; get the president to deny them as soon as possible; in any event, refuse to comment on the record or to cooperate with anyone pursuing the story. The result: We could kill the legs on such a story if we followed that strategy.

Of course we didn’t realize that about five months later we would be applying the same lessons to another presidential sexual liaison story—but this time with different results.

LATE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, January 16, 1998, I was preparing to leave my office when Michael Weisskopf, a political reporter for Time magazine, called me.

"Hear anything about the president coaching a witness who has been called before a grand jury, something relating to notes or tapes regarding the Jones case?" he asked. He made a cryptic reference to a young woman possibly being involved.

In the rhythms of the journalistic work cycle among Washington political reporters, Friday afternoons and evenings, I had learned, were critical for reporters at the newsweeklies. Their drop-dead deadlines were late Saturday afternoon. They went to press Saturday night and by early Sunday morning they were able to fax out their hottest political stories to the Sunday morning talk shows as a means of getting into the journalistic buzz for Sunday’s TV news broadcasts and Monday morning’s newspapers. To try to stay current, most of the newsweekly reporters worked right up to the last minute, looking for news nuggets or rumors about what their competitors were working on right up to Saturday evening’s deadline.

How strong is your source of information? I asked. I knew Weisskopf to be one of the best in the business—a middle-of-the-road journalist, without an ideological or personal ax to grind, with a level of integrity and a concern for accuracy and fairness that were as high as those of any journalist I had encountered over the years. But sometimes he was in the Friday afternoon trolling mode—calling me to pick up the latest tidbit or to try to figure out what his main competition, Newsweek, might be working on.

Pretty good—but won’t go on the record, Weisskopf responded. This is worth your checking it out.

I trusted Weisskopf completely. On an earlier story about the campaign-finance scandals, he had been willing to correct a mistake in his reporting on a story that could have had plenty of legs (and would have, therefore, earned him much credit) after I presented some new, exculpatory information that he was able to verify. I knew that he would not be pursuing this lead unless he had a serious source and a firm basis for doing so.

Can you tell me anything more? I pressed. Otherwise, you know, I’ll have difficulty getting people to help me.

Can’t tell you much more right now. Get back to me.

My first reaction was that there couldn’t be a basis for this rumor. The only grand-jury proceedings involving the president were the Whitewater issues and their progeny under the supervision of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. It was inconceivable to me that President Clinton would be involved in coaching or suborning perjury of any of those witnesses. In any event, I had the strong impression that Starr’s efforts to implicate the president and the first lady in these matters had come to a virtual dead end.

On the other hand, in light of my previous experiences with Weisskopf, I knew I couldn’t blow off the question, especially with the possibility that his indefatigable competitor, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, was undoubtedly working on a similar story. Learning when to treat a rumor inquiry seriously and when not to, learning which reporters knew the difference between a reliable source and an unreliable one, was one of the most important lessons I had learned during my year at the White House.

I had had lunch earlier in the afternoon with Isikoff—a strange lunch, now that I look back on it. Isikoff usually pumped me for information about stories he was working on. But on this Friday, he was more interested in what I was hearing around town, what other reporters were working on. And he asked me again why I had called him the previous July 4 to ask him whether he was working on a story about the president and another woman—the call I made just before he broke the Kathleen Willey story. Who asked you to call? he prodded. Why? What had you heard at that point? From whom?

I wouldn’t answer any of those questions, but I said something offhanded, like These womanizing stories are old hat and still haven’t gone anywhere. He was suddenly very coy. They’re more real than you think, he said. I did not take him seriously—again remembering both how insubstantial the Willey story had been and the indifferent press reaction to it.

Pursuing Weisskopf’s query, I made a few calls to colleagues in the counsel’s office, then one or two to senior aides in the political and press sectors of the White House. I had to be careful. In this type of situation, helping a reporter to confirm a story or to get additional facts was always very tricky. Once I start making calls and asking questions, the grapevine begins to operate, increasing the chances that someone will mention my inquiry—sometimes quite innocently, sometimes not—to another reporter, thus unfairly busting the original reporter’s exclusive.

As I had discovered during the previous year, leaks to other journalists based on inquiries from one news organization were not uncommon at the Clinton White House. An unfortunate consequence was that some reporters, having been burned in this way before, would tend to wait until the last minute before calling the White House for confirmation or comment on a story about to be published. This was a dangerous practice since it could mean that, in the name of protecting an exclusive, a story could get published before there was a fair opportunity to check it out for accuracy or to give the White House an opportunity to comment.

To each person I called, I said up front that this was confidential and should not be repeated to anyone. Then I mentioned my conversation with a reporter and asked whether they had heard anything along those lines. The answer each time was negative.

Since the president’s deposition in the Jones case was scheduled for the next morning, however, I guessed that the source could be someone from the Jones camp and that somehow it was related not to grand-jury testimony but to a deposition in the Jones case. I knew from past experiences that in the earliest stages of a story, reporters were often picking up pieces of information based on a kernel of truth—which was then distorted in the repeating from one source to another—much like the old grade-school game of telephone, where the first whispered message gets passed from one person to another. Though the final iteration of the message might be quite distorted, there was often a core of accuracy. And this felt like one of those instances, so I wasn’t willing to blow it off completely.

I decided to press on. I asked someone high up in the counsel’s office, Any chance you could check this out with the president or Bob Bennett?

You know we don’t go to the president with press questions on something like this, was the response.

I persisted. I tried calling David Kendall, another private attorney hired by the president, in this case to represent him on Whitewater and other matters under investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Kendall and I had been at Yale Law School together. But Kendall was out, and I left a message on his voice mail. I then called Bob Bennett. He was not in either. I assumed he would not be easy to reach, since undoubtedly he was with the president preparing for the next day’s deposition.

For one instant, I remember thinking, I’ve got to get to Bennett and make sure he and the president know about this inquiry. But I didn’t. Inwardly, I suppose, I regarded this particular subject matter as so distasteful and illegitimate that I did not wish to dignify it by asking the president for a response.

So I called Weisskopf back and told him I couldn’t confirm or deny the story, and asked him to call me if he could give me any more information, so I could make use of it to prod my colleagues to look into the story further. I went home, and heard nothing more over the weekend. None of the major news magazines had anything relating to this story or the Jones case when they were published on Sunday morning.

ON MONDAY MORNING, January 19, I arrived at the White House early, prepared to field press inquiries about the president’s deposition in the Jones case on Saturday. One of the first calls I received was from Weisskopf.

Did you see the ‘Drudge Report’ over the weekend?

No. I don’t read the ‘Drudge Report,’ I answered.

Drudge says that a young intern, Monica Lewinsky, may have had an affair with the president. The report also stated that Isikoff and Newsweek were working on this story.

I said I had never heard the name Monica Lewinsky before and asked whether anyone was taking Drudge seriously.

Something’s popping. Can’t tell you any more right now.

Even so, I received only a few phone calls that Monday and Tuesday concerning the swirling rumors generated by Drudge about the president and a White House intern.

On Tuesday evening, I was at home when, at about 9:00 P.M., I received a page from John Podesta’s office to call immediately. When I did, his assistant told me that Podesta, the deputy chief of staff, had received a phone call from Peter Baker of the Washington Post. He wanted me to return it. I remember wondering why Baker had called Podesta rather than me. That was unusual. Perhaps, I thought, it was because I was due to leave the White House on January 30 and Baker considered me to be already out the door. I returned Baker’s call.

Are you seated or standing? Baker asked me.

Seated.

We have a pretty important story and we need White House comment right away.

What’s your deadline? I asked.

About ten-thirty, but we might be able to extend that if you can get us a reaction.

He proceeded to tell me what he had. Have you ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky? he began.

Baker’s story literally took my breath away. I hung up the phone and sat for a couple of minutes, thinking, trying to absorb what I had just heard. My heart was thumping. Carolyn looked at me, concerned. What’s wrong? she asked.

This could be the worst story of the Clinton presidency. It could threaten the Clinton presidency itself.

I suffered from the boy who cried wolf syndrome with Carolyn. Oh, come on, she said. You always are concerned when these stories first break, and then they always turn out to be less serious than you thought they would be.

I don’t think this one can be worked with the same rules, I remember saying, hardly realizing the extent of the understatement.

I immediately called John Podesta back. He picked up immediately—also unusual for Podesta, who is almost always on the phone with two calls waiting.

"John, the Post is running a story with three key facts confirmed, and they want our comment," I began.

What are they?

First, they’ve confirmed that a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky claims to have had an affair with the president, and this is corroborated by tape recordings between Ms. Lewinsky and a friend.

An audible intake of breath.

Second, they’ve confirmed that Ken Starr got the tapes, went to the attorney general, and has received authority from the three-judge panel to investigate the president’s role, which includes possible perjury, subornation of perjury, and obstruction of justice.

Another more audible intake of breath.

Finally, they’ve confirmed that as a result of suspicions about this affair someone at the White House caused Ms. Lewinsky to be transferred to a job in the Pentagon.

A long silence, another, quieter intake of breath, and then … a sigh.

You better come down here right away, Podesta said quietly.

They have about an hour to an hour and a half before deadline. Where is the president? Can we get to him and find out what we should say?

I doubt it—he’s with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval. The Israeli leader was in town on a state visit.

I’m on my way, I said. By the way, I suspect others may have this story too.

I was right. As I drove along the Potomac to the White House, there was little traffic on the road. It was quiet, serene. I tried to absorb the significance of what I had just heard. I remember the one thought that struck me the hardest: Ken Starr finally had the grandjury subpoena power to investigate Bill Clinton personally—specifically, his sex life. It was frightening.

I was interrupted in my thoughts by the vibration of my pager. I looked at the lit-up message as I drove. "Call David Willman, Los Angeles Times. Urgent."

I called Willman back. He had the same story as the Post—but with a few more details about the chain of events that had led Starr to seek, and obtain, authority to investigate the president’s possible affair with an intern named Monica Lewinsky, including the possibility that Vernon Jordan had assisted the president in finding Lewinsky a job in order to keep her

Reviews for Truth to Tell

[lizasarusrex · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First let me start off and say that this book was too drawn out and slow for me. Don't get me wrong, the plot and the characters were beautifully described, I just wished the story was about a hundred pages less. By the time anything did happen, it was so far into the book I was completely impatient with the pace of the book. This book is most definitely for the reader who enjoys a good romance and/or music. It portrays her relationship between love and music and Virginia's search for perfect romance.Virginia Frost has hope for love despite she was abandoned by her ex-fiance Russ, twelve years ago. Leaving her to put her own dreams on hold. She still holds on to the romantic thought that she will find Russ and they will live happily ever after. She continues to date but only finds herself hurt over and over again.When she learns of a famous songwriter that has the same name as Russ, she can't help but think that maybe this man is the man who stood her up over a decade ago. Her friends and family try to convincer her to love the fiancé, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Henry Sheridan who she has now, and abandon the notion that she is meant to be with Russ.Who will she choose? What romantic path will she decide on.

[currerbell-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I managed to struggle through this to the end and so I give it 1* (not the ½* that I would have given it if I'd simply tossed it). This is nothing more than a fairly standard space opera with a lot of metaphysical claptrap thrown in to stretch it out to nearly 900 pages.

[alexdraven · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's an alternative 2012, and Agent Jasmine McLellan is using her fire-psychic skills to track down a serial arsonist in British Columbia... and we're launched into an unusual police procedural thriller with a personal twist.I didn't really 'gel' with Jasi, the main protagonist, and the romance element really didn't do anything for me, but the near-future setting (2012 as imagined from the early 2000's) and the low-key paranormal elements with the different psychic skills exhibited by Jasi and her team mates drew me in. Overall I found it enjoyable enough, but not sufficiently compelling that I'd seek out the rest of the series.

[nhritzuk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The illustrations in this story were hilarious and made me and my 3 year old laugh out loud. At times, the text was difficult to read because of the font and at times it was too light in color. However, the content was great and really provided the reader with the most common excuses for grumpiness. Hilarious!

[annaook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

NO SPOILERS (beyond what's on the back cover blurb)Diane Duane seems to have had fun writing this book, showing us pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland through the eyes of a New Yorker. (For those who don't know, the author is from NY and lives in the Wicklows, and I suspect quite close to the book's setting). I certainly had fun reading it, as an Italian who came to Ireland before the economic boom, and now so well settled here that I'd forgotten the perennial "cup of tea" is not a universal feature of life :-)If you liked the previous Young Wizard books, you'll like this one. I think maybe I liked the younger Nita & Kit a bit better, and I wouldn't say this is my favourite of the series -- but a pleasant read nonetheless, which I would recommend to adults as well as kids. I did love the way it took Irish mythology seriously (and knowledgeably) while at the same time having fun with it. A choice quote: "One of us met Cuchullain in warp spasm, which is enough to turn anyone's hair: that it happened in the middle of the big shopping center in Tallaght didn't help, either."

[topps_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant complex story. Curious combination of monks and science as a religion.