The cover of Room to Dream features a black-and-white photo of a little boy sitting on the front porch of an old house. It’d be cute except for the title above his head, scrawled in a font that belongs on a horror-movie poster. Suddenly the colorless photograph doesn’t arouse nostalgia, it creates a sense of unease, as though there might be something lurking in the shadows behind the smiling child. Fitting for the autobiography—of sorts—of David Lynch, a man who has dedicated his career to presenting bourgeois life as a veneered rotting corpse.

Biographers typically have an affection for their subjects. Sometimes so much so that they descend into hagiography. No danger of this from Haaretz writer Anshel Pfeffer, an extreme example of the debunking biographer. Typical of his snarky style: Netanyahu “had given up on Israeli journalists being honest enough to present him as the country’s only true leader.”