Book tip

"Stick a Fork in Me"

Dan Jenkins

Looking back over the brilliant career of sportswriter/authors Dan Jenkins — one of the funniest scribes in history, period — it's worth asking: if Jenkins was just starting out, could ANY of his novels get published? I'm betting not. Why? Well, it comes down to the suffocating beast I call Political Correctness. Now 87, Jenkins recently published what realistically might be his last novel. It's called "Stick a Fork in Me" and, if the title might be a reference to mortality, it might also be an indication that Jenkins is so exasperated by political correctness — a recurring theme in ALL his work — that he can't deal with it any more. The book is a series of first-person ruminations by Pete Wallace, the athletic director at a major college, as he waits to find out if his retirement package has been approved. In the meantime, he comments on entitled athletes, oh-so-righteous professors and administrators, politics both national and global, and American society at large. Jenkins repeats jokes from earlier books, and he has explored many of these themes before. But if "Stick" is the lesser-work "Pericles" in Jenkins's bibliography, it's still damned funny — and damned refreshing.