Mark Steyn's Plus-Size Passing Parade, Now in eBook

Today is the first Boston Marathon since last year's bombing. I write about the coverage in those first days here. A year on, the evasive passivity of the official observances is disturbing.

~I'm starting the week in New York. If you're near a receiving apparatus (as my late colleague Peter Simple used to call it), I'll be swinging by Fox News on Tuesday to join Fox & Friends and Sean Hannity, details at right.

~Speaking of "Peter Simple", his alter-ego Michael Wharton is one of the subjects in Mark Steyn's Passing Parade. Following the new eBook of my free-speech tome Lights Out, I'm pleased to announce that Passing Parade is now also available digitally. Only two months ago PJ Media's Ed Driscoll demanded:

Please add Broadway Babies and Mark Steyn's Passing Parade to the Kindle titles!

Ed's wish is my half-command. As of today, you can find Passing Parade in Kindle format at Amazon in the US and worldwide (check below for UK, Indian, Brazilian and other locations); in Nook at Barnes & Noble; and in Kobo, which I gather is big in various parts of the Commonwealth, so it should be up at Indigo-Chapters in Canada momentarily.

And this isn't just the regular old Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, but a newly expanded edition, with about 20 per cent more material. The Washington Post called me "the world's wittiest obit writer", and, whether or not that's true, I know a niche market when it's handed to me. So Passing Parade is an anthology of obituaries and appreciations of the men and women who, in ways great and small, helped shape the 20th century. In The New York Sun, David O'Neill cited my essay on Ronald Reagan as "the most moving and powerful tribute I've read", while my send-off for a far more obscure politician, the Reverend Canaan Banana remains one of the all-time favorite most requested columns here at SteynOnline. The Washington Post's Peter Carlson hailed my "delightful obit on bandleader Artie Shaw", while The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last declared that "I'll be surprised if I read a better essay this year than this beautiful, funny, sad Mark Steyn entry on Sid Luft."

So we took Luft, Shaw, Banana and Reagan, and then we added Tupac Shakur, Idi Amin, the Princess of Wales, Bob Hope, Madam Chiang Kai-shek, Pope John Paul II - plus Scotty from Star Trek, Nixon's secretary and Gershwin's girlfriend and many more. It's rthe passing parade of our times, from princes and presidents to the guy who invented Cool Whip.

And in this new edition we've delved through the SteynOnline morgue and massively expanded the book, to add my appreciations of Evel Knievel, Boris Yeltsin, scourge of Islam Oriana Fallaci and scourge of the Kennedys Dominick Dunne, plus the Cold War's oddest honey trap and 007's perennially untrapped Miss Moneypenny.

This expanded edition is only available in eBook form, so I hope you'll check it out. I'm not sure what my royalty rate on digital downloads is, but Kindle, Nook and Kobo sales do go to support my pushback against climate mullah Michael E Mann. So, if you're planning on booking a seat at the DC Superior Court for the upcoming trial of the century, a few dollars, pounds, euros and rupees from worldwide sales will ensure we put on a much better show

If you prefer, you can still buy the good old-fashioned printed edition direct from the SteynOnline bookstore, and get it personally autographed, but be warned that the paperback is the non-expanded edition, so, if you want all the new stuff, it's only available digitally. And, if you come up to me after tomorrow night's Hannity gig and whip out your Kindle, I promise to autograph it with the chisel I always keep handy for such moments.

The new expanded edition of Mark Steyn's Passing Parade is also available digitally via Kindle at Amazon worldwide. Click below for your nearest branch office:

Amazon US: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Canada: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon UK: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Australia: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon India: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon France: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Germany: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Italy: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Spain: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Japan: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Brazil: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

Amazon Mexico: Mark Steyn's Passing Parade expanded edition

~Re Ed Driscoll's other wish - for a digital edition of Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. We're working on that right now, with the help of my excellent editor at Faber in London, Belinda Matthews.

~Like the Great War long after everyone's forgotten the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the furor resulting from Patton Oswalt's approving Tweet of my Spectator column rumbles on. Speaking of which - final plug - Otto von Habsburg is one of those in the newly expanded Passing Parade.