Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

I'll See Your Worst Writer of His Generation and Raise You a Bumptious Heehaw

John Leonard: "Think of it: with a whole world of worthy targets -- Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, Eli Manning, Shell Oil, Clear Channel, Conde Nast -- he mugs a man who has spent the last quarter of a century staying poor by reviewing other people's books, who has read more widely, warmly and deeply than the vampire bat fastened to his carotid, who should be commended rather than ridiculed for a willingness to take on a review of a new translation of Mandelstam's journals, and who, even though he wrote a regrettably mixed review of a book of mine in these pages, deserves far better from the community of letters, if there is one, than Peck's bumptious heehaw: ''With friends like this, literature needs an enema.''"