The main reason I bought the book was so I could walk into the bookstore and say these words:

"Excuse me, do you have the new Hemingway?"They did, of course. "True at First Light" was released last week as Ernest Hemingway's 28th published book.

Only don't expect any book signings. The reports of Hemingway's death in 1961 were not exaggerated. That was a real shotgun.

Had he not decided to end it all and had somehow managed to buck the odds and ride out both the oncoming wave of political correctness and his granddaughter's movies, Hemingway would have turned 100 last week, the chief reason for the release of his new book, which is, in fact, a hewing down of a 200,000-word unfinished manuscript Hemingway left lying in a vault in Cuba when he died.

Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's son, cut the manuscript in half and offers a short introduction, explaining that he visited his father on the 1953 African safari in Kenya that served as the focal point for the manuscript.

Two questions no one has asked me but no doubt would were I a noted book critic:

Is the book any good? Would Papa be happy about this?

It's possible I wouldn't have said this to Hemingway's face, but I personally found the book to be quite tedious, in a male chauvinistic, misogynistic, condescending kind of way.

I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the last book I read of Hemingway's, "The Old Man and the Sea," in the 11th grade.

Nor did I enjoy it as much as the most recent book I read, the recently released Stephen King book, "The Girl Who Loved Joe Gordon," which is the story of a 9-year-old girl who gets lost in the woods in Maine and uses her hero worship of a Boston Red Sox relief pitcher named Joe Gordon to help her out.

Classic literature.

True, Joe Gordon wasn't even born -- and Stephen King was barely old enough to start having nightmares -- when Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, were on their safari.

This was a time when men were men and they didn't mind telling you so, especially if they were white men.

If nothing else, the "True at First Light" portrayal of Hemingway -- or, in this case, the fictional character playing Hemingway -- as the great white Bwana, superior to all, shows how much we've changed in social consciousness.

Were Hemingway alive, he would have NOW and the NAACP camped on his doorstep, alongside PETA and the ACLU.

My guess is Hemingway, wherever he is, is very upset.

His son took a perfectly fine unfinished manuscript and edited it down to a book.

And put his father's name it.

And is selling it for $26.

Without permission!

No writer I know of, not even a would-be writer -- including myself -- wants anybody, well-meaning sons included, taking what he wrote and messing with it.

Still, this is Hemingway, and so what if he was a hard-drinking, bull-killing, woman-dominating egomaniac?

He was a gifted writer.

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For example, there's this paragraph, written early in the manuscript, with Hemingway using the fictional him to express his views on others taking liberty with his thoughts and feelings:

"Lately I had read with distaste various books written about myself by people who knew all about my inner life, aims and motives. Reading them was like reading an account of a battle where you had fought written by someone who had not only not been present but, in some cases, had not even been born when the battle had taken place. All these people who wrote of my life both inner and outer wrote with an absolute assurance that I had never felt."

Even from the grave, Hemingway remains the master, getting his point across loud and clear.

Send e-mail to (benson@desnews.com), fax 801-237-2527. Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

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