Oprah caught touting another bogus book

"Dreams" may prove to be the most consequential literary hoax of our time, but unlike Roseblat's or Frey's, Obama's memoir has enormous political value.

No, not that fake concentration camp story. Oprah previously pushed a book detailing the fake "Odyssey" of a young man searching for his father's dreams.

The thesis is simple enough: Bill Ayers served as Barack Obama's muse in the creation of Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Ayers breathed creative life into this ungifted amateur, who had written nothing of note before, and reconceived him as a literary prodigy.

"I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase," said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of the Dreams' author. "I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography." Agreed, it was not normal at all.

For simplicity's sake, I refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." He provided the basic narrative and surely had the final say. Not content to merely edit, however, the highly skilled Ayers appears to have woven the rough strands of Obama's life with tales from Homer's Odyssey and spun a work of literature in the process.

Ayers leaves scarcely an Homeric trope unturned in his mining of the Odyssey to describe Obama's "personal interior journey." Before he completes his heroic cycle, Obama will confront green-eyed seductresses, blind seers, lotus-eaters, the "ghosts" of the underworld, whirlpools, and about a half dozen sundry "demons." It was not, however, until I identified a menacing one-eyed bald man in Dreams that I became convinced that the parallelism was conscious.

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