Michael Moore’s latest book: Sound and fury, signifying idiocy

Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life
By Michael Moore
448 pp.  Grand Central Publishing.  $26.99.

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If you’re the type who loves to be regaled by Michael Moore’s teenage masturbation stories, you are going to love his new “anti-memoir,” set to be released September 13.

If, however, you just threw up on yourself, you might think twice before opening up “Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life.”

Moore’s new tome is divided into more than 20 chapters containing stories of his large life. In order to get through the stories, of course, you have to trust that what Moore says is true. Given his record, that’s next to impossible.

Take this strange-sounding tale, just as an example. In discussing his family’s migration to Michigan in the 1800s and his ancestor Silas Moore’s interaction with Indians, Moore notes how progressivism runs in his blood. “Not all the white people in the area maintained the same friendly relations with the Indians as did Silas Moore,” he writes.

To hear Moore tell it, when the local Indian tribe came down with measles and the rest of Moore’s community quarantined themselves from them, it was Silas Moore — and Silas Moore alone — who came to the rescue, risking life and limb to help the Indian tribe.

Moore even quotes a verbatim conversation between Silas Moore and the Indian chief, who apparently spoke English, which comes across like something Disney would concoct.

“I am here to help,” [Silas Moore] said, his voice raised so they could hear him. “I am here to help. How many of you are sick?”

“Many,” said the chief. “Some die. The rest, we need food and supplies.”

Once the Indian tribe recovered, “for years they would never forget the generosity of Silas Moore.” And “[when] his [Silas’] son, Martin, was of school age, instead of sending him to the Elba school … Silas sent him to the Indian school that the county had established near his house.”

Maybe all of this happened. Maybe the Indian chief actually spoke just like he was in Disney’s “Pocahontas.” Just call me skeptical — especially considering the source.

Many of Moore’s tales sound made-up or manufactured to push his agenda. His pro-choice stance was solidified after a friend of his was forced into a back-alley abortion. He remembers a tormented gay boy on his block who ultimately committed suicide. Conveniently, “Many of the names and circumstances have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty.”

Throughout, Moore tries to prove to the reader just how smart he is. He tells us how well he did in school. He learned to read early. Teachers noticed how bored he was in first grade and thought he “should have been in the second grade (if not the third!).” He was expelled from a seminary high school because he “upset the other boys by asking too many questions.” Later, his high school friends “humorously tolerated my I’m-sorry-to-be-so-smart attitude.”

Moore doth protest too much. Like Keith Olbermann constantly citing his Cornell pedigree, Moore thinks if he says he is a genius often enough, people will start to believe it. But unlike Olbermann, Moore doesn’t have a fancy Ivy League degree to lend his self-proclaimed brilliance at least a small modicum of credibility.

NEXT: When Moore isn't trying to prove how smart he is, he's expending considerable energy trying to demonstrate how heroic he is