People who kiss and tell are often scorned. But media critic and reformer Jeff Cohen should be applauded for telling us what life was like when he entered the belly of the corporate beast—working for CNN, Fox, and MSNBC as the token progressive commentator for a right-tilting establishment. Cohen, who lives in Woodstock, recounts his 15 years as a liberal voice on national television in his new book. It's an amusing and fast-paced read, but his two-pronged attack—on cable TV news's unwillingness to give the left a chance and the stifling power of corporate ownership—is actually an old story.

For more than 40 years, critics have lamented that progressive voices cannot get a fair hearing, whether because of advertisers or right-wing owners. What makes Cable News Confidential a "must-read," as Molly Ivins dubbed it, is that Cohen was inside the "breathless, wheezing world of 24-hour cable television news" from 1987 to 2002. He found a "drunken exuberance for sex, crime, and celebrity stories, matched by a grim timidity and fear of offending the powers that be—especially if the powers that be are conservatives. The biggest fear is doing anything that could get...your network accused of being a liberal."

The irony is that conservatives fiercely attack the media for its supposed left-wing bias, and have successfully cowed some into not giving voice to genuine liberal views. While cable TV news only garners a nightly audience of 3 to 5 million (CBS, NBC, and ABC get 27 million!), it is watched closely by opinion elites, setting the agenda for discussion.

Cohen might have been naive to think he could make a difference. But he tried nonetheless, starting with CNN, the first 24-hour news network. He appeared often on Crossfire, a nightly show with representatives from the political left and right. He found, however, that the representative of the left, with whom he was supposed to side, was usually a centrist. The left never had a chance as conservatives Bob Novak and Pat Buchanan pounded away. Cohen recreates some of his fiery exchanges in detail.

But CNN kept inviting Cohen back, probably because he's articulate and knowledgeable—and because he came from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a national media watch group that is respected for marshaling facts about media performance. Cohen was one of its founders.

In 2002, Cohen joined Fox—a surprising move since the station was owned by arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch and run by Roger Ailes, who ran Richard Nixon's 1968 advertising campaign. At "fair and balanced" Fox, Cohen learned, "Even the weather and sports guys were rabid rightists." He admits, "It felt strange to collect even a small check from Murdoch, a symbol of all that was wrong with corporate media."

Oddly enough, Fox gave Cohen room to attack. "I savaged the corporate media week after week and got paid for it," he writes. Eight times he appeared with Bill O'Reilly. Though they did not get along, Cohen says, "most of my appearances were cordial, often embarrassingly so." He has some not-so-cordial words, however, for Ann Coulter ("a cross between Joan Rivers and Eva Braun"), and nightly anchor Brit Hume (whose "ignorance is equaled only by his arrogance").

Cohen went to MSNBC (owned by General Electric) when his friend Phil Donahue convinced him they had a chance to provide a liberal voice to counter Fox. But that dream was quickly shattered. "Genuflecting to the right was the natural bent of every cable executive I ever met," he concludes, citing the quick demise of Donahue's nightly talk show, which constantly questioned the lead-up to war. Instead of viewing it as a strong counter-message to Fox's O'Reilly, MSNBC saw it as unpatriotic.

Cohen writes, "I'd always thought...it was our patriotic duty to be skeptical, in times of peace or war." Think again, Jeff. In the end, he learned, "If you're wild and wacky and on the right wing...you'll find a home in cable news." I suspect Jeff Cohen won't be going home again.

Unapologetic anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator Emile Poulquet, who deported thousands of Jews while serving as a rural French prefect during World War II, narrates this striking novel, a selective remembrance of his morally ambiguous life. A surgically disguised fugitive and assumer of serial aliases, he has evaded justice for 50 years. In 1999, after barely surviving a high-profile trial, he fled Paris to avoid a second trial and all-but-certain sentencing.

Poulquet returns—for the third time in his 84 years—to the fictional Finier, his native village in the Pyrenees and the scene of his "crimes against humanity," a categorization he rejects in equivocating his actions as born of personal slights endured throughout his youth. There, he hopes to confront his primary childhood tormentor, Arianne Fauret (obsessively recollected in his self-pitying account), who is currently hosting a reunion of wartime refugees. Also on the scene is his former best friend, Israel "Izzy" Horowitz Lisson, who the onetime prefect ultimately betrayed with a check of his bureaucratic pen. Awash in irreconcilable contradictions issuing from his past, and cloaked in yet another identity, Poulquet takes up with a band of young, anarchist-styled wastrels. He winds up squatting with this homeless "tribe" in a crawl space, an architectural feature common in buildings of the region and emblematic of the narrator's delusional memories. "You know that being a fugitive from others' ideas eventually makes you into a sort of eternal child, forever peeking through slats," he relates without remorse.

Edie Meidav, now teaching at Bard College, crafts a complex narrator in Crawl Space, his detached and distant dominant tone reminiscent of the protagonist's in André Gide's The Immoralist (1902). But as a master of disguise, Poulquet is likewise a verbal chameleon. Oscillating between charming erudition and prolix solipsism, he also embraces the argot of his immediate milieu, whether echoing the drug-addled shorthand of the profligates ("How about it? Might do you good.") or imitating newspapermen ("I said Nowheresville").

Similar displays of linguistic virtuosity have earned creator Meidav a slew of literary accolades, including the Bard Fiction Prize for writers under 40 and the Kafka Award for best novel by an American woman. She received wide critical acclaim for The Far Field (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), and with Crawl Space, Meidav extends the range of her prodigious talent—both as a savvy stylist and visionary storyteller.

Meidav also attempts to capture the taciturn cynicism of the French bourgeoisie, often in comedic gestures. For instance, in silently assessing a chamber-piece rehearsal, Poulquet observes, "It had the crash and thud of arbitrary modernity, as if a demolition crew had taken a liking to cello, violin, clarinet, piano." Meidav is also adept at exposing hermetic quirks hidden behind her characters' blasé masks: Poulquet swings a watch-and-fob pendulum to decide what to eat, or whether to advance or retreat. Adrianne is a compulsive hoarder, while her husband Paul, a French Resistance fighter and Poulquet's nemesis, spirals into insanity.

The portraits of central players in Poulquet's life drama, mainly rendered in detailed flashbacks or cartoonish glimpses, sometimes appear forced and unconvincing. The wastrels, however, emerge from this turgid undertow like rainbow trout, particularly tattooed, Bodhisattva-like junkie Moses and hard-edged beauty Cerb-X, whose "weird eloquence" the narrator admires. Asked by Poulquet to explain her recent piercings, "tiny golden and silver hoops descending from the tip of her nose in a pagan's straight line," she replies in part, "It's like hermeneutic magic? Like Sir Isaac Newton? He was an alchemist. And I'm like a witch."

While the novel's connect-the-dots denouement feels somewhat contrived and predictable, Meidav deserves credit for ambitiously tackling multifaceted characters against the difficult backdrop of the Holocaust and its aftershock ideology. Under a sky "turned a poisonous blue," Poulquet admits to Moses, "Our imprints are everywhere, it's inescapable...you can't run from humanity."

Ever since 12-year-old Feltus Ovalton LeRoi's parents moved him from a comfy suburban home to a city apartment, he's been miserable. His new school is packed with bullies, and his parents, a self-absorbed duo obsessed with upward mobility, seem barely aware of him any more, let alone of his growing anguish. He copes by adapting; his parents ignore him, so he ignores them. As he's bullied at school, so he bullies others. But just before Feltus gives up all hope that things will ever be better, he finds a tattered old binder in the back of his closet and chants some strange words that are scrawled inside it. He's not really surprised when all that happens is that the lights flicker briefly. And he tells himself he's not disappointed—he just doesn't care anymore.

But soon after, a relative arrives for an unexpected visit, Great Aunt Eunida, who neither parent seems willing to claim. And for good reason: She's a smelly, slovenly creature who totes an enormous toad, spouts nonsense, and wears crinkly tinfoil hats. She eats odd, malodorous food combinations, preferably featuring sardines.

But as Feltus soon discovers, Eunida will leave them with more than just greasy blots on the couch. She's a prophet who's having trouble with her gift. Strange smells fill the apartment and strange beings soon follow: first a moth who screams "Help!" just before Feltus hits it with a shoe, and then a group of fancy-furred critters who call themselves "PoodleRats." There's a portal to other worlds, they tell Feltus, right under his dining room table, and they've come to scavenge food because their land has been invaded by a mob of predatory rodents. There's little hope for them, they say, except for an ancient prophecy that tells of a savior who will vanquish their foe. For some incredible reason, they're convinced that savior is Feltus.

How can someone who can't even go to the boy's bathroom without getting pummeled save an entire world? It's an enormous responsibility made even more weighty by the discovery that the ancient binder was once Eunida's, and all these strange arrivals were caused by a tear in the veil that separates worlds—a rift made by Feltus himself when he recklessly chanted those odd words.

The Curious Misadventures of Feltus Ovalton is a middle-grade children's fantasy with thematic elements that may ring familiar: a boy who lives with awful people, a prophecy he's supposed to fulfill, and a magical talent he never suspected he had. But this heroic anti-hero has more story DNA from Roald Dahl than the creator of He Who Must Not Be Named. The grownups here are grievously ignorant of the world of children, and Feltus is an unwilling champion who's nearly forced into strapping on a hero's mantle. The effects of his efforts open yet another rift, this one in the cold, shriveled lump that used to be Feltus's heart.

Like Dahl's work, this wildly original book is saturated with dark humor, and author Treggiari has a knack for terrific character names. An angelic-appearing guardian of the veil is called Dare Al Luce, which in Italian means "give to the light," and the PoodleRats' enemies are the Kehezzzalubbapipipi, a name that mandates giggling.

Though children, especially boys, will find relevance and entertainment in Feltus's magical adventures, the book could have used more judicious editing; at 334 pages, it's a bit long for the younger part of its intended eight-and-up audience. Additionally, it serves up vocabulary that will send even the most precocious young reader repeatedly to the dictionary, another characteristic that makes this book more potentially appealing for imaginative 'tweens and teens.

Woodstock resident Jo Treggiari will read from her book at 5pm on Saturday, October 28, at the Woodstock Wool Company in an event sponsored by the Golden Notebook bookstore. For more information, visit www.feltusovalton.com.