Being a collection of odds and ends from pugnacious novelist and social commentator Mailer. The book gathers Mailer's 1964 reporting of the national political conventions, some opinion pieces, literary criticism, some insignificant poems and short stories, a letter or two, and "interviews", mostly self-generated. Mailer was a gifted but erratic writer and his strengths and weaknesses are on full display here. The book has the unhappy quality of having the most interesting reading first. Thus we begin with the fascinating convention reports as well as opinion pieces which are interesting, at least as thought stimulants, because of Mailer's rather fanciful politics. The literary criticism, which comes next, is insightful enough, but it deals almost entirely with half-forgotten mid-20th century novelists, and is tediously negative--did this poor man never read a book that he liked? Finally, the tired reader must slog through his nearly unreadable interviews with himself, and their abstruse ramblings would embarrass a dorm room at half-past midnight. Ultimately, Mailer's best nonfiction was his convention reportage, and this is gathered in the much better collection Some Honorable Men. That's the go-to for the best of Mailer's nonfiction. ( )