So apparently Judith Regan saw the item that I wrote yesterday about why I'm not bothered by her Mickey Mantle book, and she decided to invite me onto her weekly show for Sirius Satellite Radio to talk about the controversy with the book's author, Peter Golenbock, acquiring editor Doug Grad, and Ed Randall of WFAN. Which meant that I got to come into the city to hang out at the Sirius studios across the street from Radio City for about an hour, which was fun.

Now, when I wrote yesterday's item, I had only seen the original PW Daily piece about the book, not the gonzo frontpage story in the Daily News, which is the one that really pushed Regan's buttons—as well it would, considering that it started "Shameful new book pimps Mick" and got meaner as it went along. So the conversation, as orchestrated by Regan, really boiled down to three main themes:

(1) Mickey Mantle was a hard-drinking womanizer, so there.
(2) People can give Regan shit for publishing controversial viewpoints all they want, but we've still got a First Amendment.
(3) There's a lot of people in the media elite who have it in for Judith Regan, not to mention the backstabbers at HarperCollins (although she did, and with perhaps her fiercest vituperation at that).

I mostly stuck to the first topic, with the added point that lots of novels have been written in the voice of real-life people without rioting in the street; as my one good soundbite put it, "Nobody ever read I, Claudius and said, oh my God, this guy makes Caligula out to be a total sex maniac!" Anyway, if you've got the Sirius, you can listen to that starting this weekend. I'll see if I can get a brief clip for the rest of us.