Jul 05, 2006

The worst book of the year

The worst book of the year, is surely Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof. Boof, a Washington DC-raised Sudanese-American “womanist” poet, has garnered publicity with her claim that she was Osama bin Laden’s mistress in the mid-90s. In lurid prose she details her life as bin Laden’s moll. However, the book is rife with howlers large and small, for instance, there is one vividly recounted scene in which Boof performs sex acts on a group that included bin Laden; Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two; Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian jihadist theoretician. Boof says this happened in Morocco in 1996. However, in 1996 bin Laden was living in Sudan, Ayman al Zawahiri was imprisoned in Dagestan, Azzam had been assassinated in Pakistan thirteen years earlier, and Qutb had been lying in his grave for three decades. Boof should stick to poetry.