Last week, I criticized the title of the forthcoming William Morrow book Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter:

That is one annoying and offensive title. Coulter is not “brainless” — she’s obviously very intelligent, and has successfully pandered her way to millions of dollars. In addition, “brainless” and “lunacy” implicitly reference cultural stereotypes of women as dumb or crazy.

As someone who wrote thousands of words criticizing Coulter at Spinsanity, I hope the book is more constructive than the title suggests.

It turns out that the author of the book, Joe Maguire, admits that the title gives him pause in a blog post on the book’s website:

Brainless. Not exactly the title I had expected for my first book. As is typical for most writers, I had imagined something more … I don’t know … literary, I guess. Not that I’d change the title if I could. The old saw that you can’t judge a book by its cover doesn’t really apply here. I just wonder what people will think about it, that’s all.

I worry that bookstore browsers will simply dismiss it as an opportunistic hatchet job on a defenseless easy target. But given that you’re curious enough about the book to be reading this, my guess is I don’t have to worry about such a thing with you. And, at the risk of self-promotion, the fact is that Brainless is anything but an unwarranted attack on a harmless celebrity.

In a response to me posted yesterday, he goes on to defend the title as “catchy”:

Following up on my first blog entry, in which I mention that I wouldn’t necessarily have picked “Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter” as the title of my first book, I thought I would respond to the suggestion that the title is “nasty.”

I prefer “catchy.”

Brendan Nyhan, Coulter-critic extraordinaire, disagrees. Writing for the online edition of American Prospect (in what was later mentioned in Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes column in the Washington Post) he calls the title “annoying and offensive.” Nyhan goes on to say that “Coulter is not ‘brainless’” and that the terms “‘brainless’ and ‘lunacy’ implicitly reference cultural stereotypes of women as dumb or crazy.”

Frankly, I don’t see the sexism in calling someone brainless (in an obvious joke) or in the contention that she’s a lunatic. Neither of those is an inherently female characteristic. We all HAVE brains, after all. And while women’s menstrual cycles can be affected by the moon, it hardly means that lunatics are solely female. (That’s why they picked Michael J. Fox, and not Justine Bateman, for “Teen Wolf.”)

I could better understand his contention if I had called her “hysterical” — a term derived from the Latin word for “uterus” and implying that hysteria was the result of some problem with the womb. Or maybe if he had said the joke was too broad. (And that is NOT a Freudian slip, thank you very much.)

Not particularly convincing. At a minimum, the title suggests that the book is an “opportunistic hatchet job,” as he put it.