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I haven't been shy about my enthusiasm for Larry J. Kolb's spy memoir, Overworld, and since Kolb did pitch in last month, I'm not exactly an objective observer. But the recent Fort Worth Star-Telegram review by Pete Alfano really calls out for a bit of rebuttal.

I happen to disagree with the idea that the book, "while at times fascinating, ultimately is self-indulgent and somewhat overwritten," but I can see why Alfano thinks so, and that's not my objection. I'm more concerned about the (on its face reasonable) insinuation that not every one of Kolb's assertions should be treated as gospel fact. "Kolb asserts," Alfano writes, "that a young and more subdued the Rev. Al Sharpton spied on [Muhammad] Ali and other black leaders as a government informant, to avoid prosecution for alleged drug involvement."

As it happens, that's not something Kolb "asserts" out of the blue, but something he describes as having read in the press. Those last three words are the key here: Kolb isn't making any groundbreaking revelations about Sharpton, just recounting a fairly common story that, over the years, you could read about in Newsday articles or in a Nation profile of Sharpton or in Jack Newfield's Don King bio; Bryant Gumbel even played the portions of the FBI tape showing Sharpton with an undercover agent on his HBO show back in 2002. All of this information is readily available to somebody willing to do the slightest bit of research. I found the book a bit implausible, too, when I read it, so I looked up some of the random data points that could be verified, and each of them checked out. If you punch in the right keywords, you can even find the photograph of Jesse Jackson and Muhammad Ali in which Kolb says he's standing droopy-eyed in the background, looking an awful lot like Elvis.

As I say, I don't begrudge Alfano most of his criticisms of what he views as Kolb's technical flaws; it could just be that I'm willing to cut the guy more slack because I found his stories entertaining. While he feels "Kolb can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to write about what it's like to be a real-life James Bond or about the lifestyles of the rich and famous," I see it as a demonstration that the world's "juice" is distributed as generously among Adnan Kashoggi and even Muhammad Ali as it is among heads of state. (Heck, in this administration, corporate and governmental seats of power are virtually interchangable.) Granted, we may never know for sure if Kolb's telling true about, say, the "real reason" Rudy Giuliani went after Kashoggi during his days as a federal prosecutor. But given how much of his story does hold up to scrutiny, it's certainly worth giving the author a lot more benefit of the doubt...and worth doing some of that scrutinizing before making a final assessment.