The MagazineFirst, I’d Like to Thank the Academy . . .From The ScrapbookFeb 13, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 21
• By THE SCRAPBOOK
 The Scrapbook has a well-documented weakness for acknowledgments. No, not the virtue of gratitude or the practice of recognizing indebtedness in general. We refer to those explanatory paragraphs, usually appended to the end of a book, where authors traditionally thanked the various libraries and archives they had consulted.  Except that, what really keeps The Scrapbook entertained is the fact that nowadays Acknowledgments are veritable Oscar-award-winning orgies of recognition. They are, in truth, prime specimens of what we might call the self-infatuation of the baby boom generation. Today, a typical Acknowledgments page will not just thank the usual suspects but also include a long list of friends, colleagues, mentors, and celebrity acquaintances—all carefully and conspicuously named—as well as a shout-out to agents, editors, publicists, long-suffering spouses, and neglected offspring. If the author first learned about excise taxes while a student at Yale, or during a session at the Aspen Institute, we will be sure to hear about it. Some author-celebrities, like -Fareed Zakaria, Ph.D., of CNN’s -Fareed Zakaria GPS, are past masters of the genre, consuming several pages with self-deprecating banter designed to assure us that they know everything and everybody. But some, such as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, are nominally more subtle. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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