Sergei Minaev, the author of Media Sapiens, made a dollar off me by selling me his book, thanks to Ilya yashin. Yashin called me, apparently fully convinced for some reason that Minaev and I were on friendly terms (even though I had only met him on the set of Fight Club), and shouted into the phone: “Tell your Minaev he’s an asshole.” It turned out that the book features a certain young political consultant, “a goateed boy named Yasha,” who makes money skimming small amounts from the budget allocated for rounding up crowds. As it turned out when I read the book, aside from the “goateed” part, Yasha and yashin have nothing else in common. But that was enough to make me buy Media Sapiens. The book is full of recognizable figures from the “liberal-democratic тусовка (party crowd),” and every last one of them is a crook, a loser, or a two-faced operator. Some are written about quite amusingly (like Marina Litvinovich (abstract2001), who at one point gets an ice axe shoved up her ass), while others get nothing but complete nonsense. The chief overseer of the opposition seems to have been modeled on Osovtsov. Though it may be some kind of composite character (strangely, Osovtsov’s famous hippopotamus isn’t mentioned). I think Media Sapiens will be a little less successful than Dukhless. The average reader is much more interested in tall tales about the lives of managers supposedly snorting cocaine nonstop than in tall tales about the lives of PR people. And PR people themselves won’t find it much fun to read either, since what’s described really is just tall tales. On top of that, the book is overloaded with all sorts of in-jokes and insider get-togethers: from zashtopik with Rykov to sumerk. Though maybe that’s actually smart marketing, and the core readership will be LiveJournal users, who will drive sales. Still, the book accomplishes its main task brilliantly: my main thought after reading the last page was, “I should try Dewar’s whisky.” The drink is mentioned practically every other word, which makes me think this isn’t just product placement — Minaev himself must be handling Dewar’s distribution and chose publishing a new book as the main way to push his booze onto the market. In any case, amigo095 is a handsome devil: everyone will grimace and spit, but they’ll buy the book anyway. And each of us will send him a dollar, which he’ll slip with a sly smile into his beaded little purse.
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