Passes the Smell Test & the Brain Test–But Only as a Preamble,
November 8, 2006
Barack Obama
This book gets five stars from me because it is much more thoughtful and much less platitudinous than the standard run of the mill “getting to know me” books that every politician with any ambition puts out.
The author understands all the key points including how broken government is, how uncivil Congress is, how out of touch we are with reality. He understands that government does have important safety net roles to play, that education and investment in science & technology are the foundation for the future, and so on and so on. This down-to-earth yet explicit and integrated perspective puts him head and shoulders above the even the best of the best from the past.
Bottom line: this book confirms the author's status as a first-rank leader (I don't insult him with the lesser term of politician) of great promise. The promise is implicit in this book, not explicit.
Now I want to see a book that addresses the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, and how he proposes to create a common-sense trans-partisan government that ends the winner take all nature of both the Cabinet and the Congress, and integrates real world information with real world budgets to get us to where the Comtroller General of the USA, the Honorable David Walker, says we need to be: providing for the future.
A for effort. The first book finished elementary school. This book finishes high school. I wait with bated breath for the serious book with all the details.
Philosophical, Practical, Gifted Turns of Phrase, Starting Point,
November 8, 2006
Andrew Sullivan
This is a philosophical essay, not a political diatribe. This is a very educated, articulate, thoughtful, and practical book. It is so good it probably needs to be read more than once.
As an estranged moderate Republican who believes in a balanced budget, smaller government, and minimalist interference in state, local, and individual rights not assigned to the federal government by the Constitution (and also the elimination of central banks that are NOT authorized by the Constitution), I found provocation, solace, and humor in this book (the discussion of the role of the penis and its eternal sperm, in relation to fundamentalist strictures and fears, is alone worth the price of the book).
Gifted turns of phrases as well as erudite references to both ancient and modern philosopher-kings abound. I especially likes “Immoral decisions, in other words, are like environmental pollutants” (page 125), and on page 209, “In this nonfundamentalists understanding of faith, practice is more imporant than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle.”
The author's real life as a gay man who has survived AIDS no doubt infuriates the fundamentalists and the less hypocritical evangelists, but this is part and parcel of his qualifications–he completely trashes both the incumbent President and the Christian extremist fundamentalists that have substituted dogma for dialog.
This is a personal essay. It is neither a summary nor a substitute for the many other books I have reviewed on both the left and the right, and so I end by saying that the book gets five stars for its extra leavening of philosophical reasoning, but I urge those who find favor in this book to throw a wider net, or at least read my reviews of the last 25 books on ideology, religion, faith, Iraq, and the impeachable offenses of Bush-Cheney.
Judging by his enemies, the author is a giant. His book tends to harp a bit, with a recounting of his many appearances on broadcast media, how the extreme right hates him, and how separation is good. I would normally drop it to four stars for the harping, but the substance is the best I've seen. This is a solid five-star review of both the massive fortunes being accumulated by the evangelical right, all tax free and completely absent any government oversight or audit. The author is responsible for documenting 56 cases where the religious right has broken the law by supporting specific candidates, for which they should lose their tax exempt status.
The author provides a clear and thoughtful discussion of the intent of our Founding Fathers, and why a theocracy, which is what we have in effect (but see my review of Tempting Faith, which may destroy the blind faith of the right in the Bush-Cheney regime), reduces religious freedom and tolerance.
Indeed, the author blasts Senator Lieberman (I-CT) for his constant use of religion to justify laws and positions. I believe the author would concur with Rabbi Michael Lerner's “Left Hand of God,” to wit, we should strive to be people of faith, and live by our faith's tenets, but NOT mingle state funds and church funds, state regulations and church rites.
In historical context, the author discusses how protestant conservative churches grew and then tried to use the state to resist the influx of Catholics and other non-Protestant minorities.
The author discusses the hypocricy of the faith-based charities that want to be exempt from both taxation and regulation (e.g. hiring minorities), while taking money from the government under fomulas that are best questionable.
If there is a luducrous side to the nutty right-wing evangelicals, it can be seen in their fear of Harry Potter films as promoting the occult. The author goes on at length to describes how “family friendly” is code for censorship of schools, libraries, and communities. By calling anything at all “lewd and obscene” the nutty right is censoring virtually all non-fiction and a great deal of science (see my review of Roger Shattuck's “Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.”)
The author's bottom line is that the religious right is hateful and intolerant. On page 234 he states that the extreme right fears information while sensitive people of faith welcome information.
This is a really fine book, it says what needs to be said about the tax evasion and inappropriate political activities of the extreme right.
I like to read in twos or threes, and in this case the two books I read on the religious right were Reverend Barry Lynn's “Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freeedom,” and this one. Lynn's comes in first by a nose, but they are both excellent primers on everything going wrong both within the extreme right, and between the church and the state.
The author is a gay Christian minister who was uniquely privileged as a ghost writer for the heavy hitters on the extreme right from Jerry Falwell to Pat Robertson, work done prior to his realizing he was gay.
The author provides a useful distinction, one I often forget, between fundamentalists who are driven by fear and focused on imposing their strict version of faith on others, and evangelicals who are more reasonable and tolerant.
This book is richer in historical content than Lynns, and for that reason alone should be considered a “must read” along with Lynns' book. In addition to history the author describes a broad concern over two Americas emergent, one fundamentalist and one normal. The author takes care to discuss how Bible-based fear and loathing come from the fundamentalists, themselves, not from the Bible.
I had the pleasure,on the flight from Lubbock to Dallas, of sitting next to the wife of Senator Frist. I was not planning to comment on this book, but because the marital relationship is mentioned above, and because I love non-fiction books deeply, I just want to say that the author is a real person, a personable person, and this book should be bought on its merits.
It does not cover the negative father-daughter relationships, only the positive ones. If you are a father with daughters, buy this book for its example of what worked, what left lasting love in the hearts of daddy's daughters. The family, not the party, is the foundation of this Nation's greatness (and its current decline in broken and non-nuclear families in name only}, so I regard this book as one of the building blocks for getting us back on track.
Revisionist, Questionable, Valuable, and a Starting Point,
October 20, 2006
Mark Moyar
I write this in Lubbock, Texas where historian Mark Moyar presented his conclusions in very summary form to one of the most extraordinary collection of individuals to ever gather on the topic of “Intelligence in the Vietnam War,” an event co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Intelligence (Central Intelligence Agency) and the Vietnam Center (Texas Tech University).
While I came to hear authors like George Allen, whose 50 years of on-the-ground experience are presented in NONE SO BLIND, the definitive work on intelligence in the Viet-Nam war, and C. Michael Hiam, first time author who has done an utterly amazing job in describing, defending, and honoring Sam Adams in Who the Hell are We Fighting?, I have to credit this author, graduate of Harvard, student of Christopher Andrew the singular at Cambridge, with ripping me out of my chair and forcing me to think about the relative merits of documentation versus oral histories versus personal observation (I was there from August 1963 to late 1967).
Here are three bottom lines on the book:
1) It is some of the most erudite, earnest, well-intentioned, and potentially explosive revisionist history directly relevant to the intelligence-policy relationship as well as relations among nations.
2) It is lacking in an understanding of how the veterans of the war actually perceive it, taking both secondary sources and original documents from varied governments including China and Viet-Nam, at face value.
3) It merits the benefit of the doubt, a serious reading by those that were actually there, and inputs, in the form of oral histories, to the Oral History Project Head at the Vietnam Archive (Texas Tech University). If you have substantive comment to make on this book, don't stop here at Amazon–call them at 806.742.9010 and schedule a short telephone interview to add your oral history to the collection.
I read a lot and have had a fortunate life. I have always known that governments lie in the documents and their public statements, that secondary sources are all too happy to bend the truth to make a case, but it was not until this moment that I realized just how very urgent it is to dramatically increase our oral history and direct understanding of every aspect of the Viet-Nam debacle, one we repeat today in Iraq and Afghanistan, where those fighting have no memory of both the successes and failures of the past.
My gravest concern with this important and worthy book is that it plays to what the extremist unilateral militants–including the chicken hawks now serving–want to hear: that imperial adventurism can succeed if one just intervenes a little more harshly, a little sooner, with a bit more cleverness.
I have been an iconoclast, and I now find myself defending and praising an individual for having produced a work that conflicts sharply with my narrow understanding of the reality as I lived it, and that of the many others attending this conference.
I regard this book as a very courageous and intelligent offering, one that must be regarded as a work in progress, and one that will add substantially to our understanding once the author has a chance to write an epilogue that factors in the comments of those now living who were actually there.
Five stars for brave brains. This author must be reckoned with.
Brilliant Articulate Documentation of Rank Hypocrisy,
October 19, 2006
David Kuo
This book is a bright shining truth, and after absorbing every single word while flying across America, with copious notes, I have nothing but complete admiration for the author. As he sums it up, the promises made by the Bush-Cheney-Rove team to the evangelical right were a wild ride with a spectacular flame-out. Eight billion was promised for faith-based charities, $30 million was actually delivered. The White House, not Congress, took the tax cuts and tax credits for charity out of the legislation.
This is an extremely thoughtful and well-developed account. The first half of the book recounts the author's journey from Kennedy staffer to pro-life to evangelical Republican, and that first half of the book is essential to understanding the great good of the evangelical right, setting up a better understanding of the great bads that followed.
The author pulls no punches early on in the book in suggesting that the evangelical right punish Bush-Cheney-Rove (strangely, he never mentions Cheney, only Rove and Card) by “fasting” in the 2006 elections, i.e. not voiting.
I was seriously moved and impressed with his account of how and why he accepted Jesus in a pro-active manner, and how he then was able to move beyond lip service and taking Jesus for granted, and into a life of service. He gives Chuck Colson, Nixon's former hatchetman and resurrected evangelist, credit for his awakening.
The history of the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, and the manner in which they mobilzed at least ten million but closer to thirty million evangelicals one neighborhood at a time, bottom up and inside out, in less than three years, is both religious and political history at its finest. 40% of the Republican delegates in 2000 were in one way or another connected to “The Fellowship,” itself a fascinating social network.
The author impresses me with his maturity in understanding that faith is an innoculation against corruption, and in seeing the danger of confusing one's agenda with God's will.
The author was in at the creation of Empower America with Bennett, Kemp, and Kirkpatrick, and I found his core theme of the need for a cultural renewal of our values and who we are as a Nation, compelling. He discusses the social pathologies that are decomposing our society (see my review of “The Cheating Culture”).
I especially liked his balanced presentation of how Clinton agreed that we have gotten too secular, and would urge both left and right to read that superb book, “The Left Hand of God,” which is, with this one, a fundamental text for healing our Nation.
The author was with Team Ashcroft on the Hill, and recounts with distress how Gingrich blew off the Christian Coalition and social issues.
The book substantially improved my regard for George Bush as a person, and for John Ashcroft as a person and a politician. I was expecially taken with the author's sincere descriptions of Bush's genuineness, and of AZshcroft's integrity in not pushing his religion on others. The description of how George Bush stops, slows down, and connects to former addicts is alone worth the price of the book. He's been there and it is never far from his mind.
There is one inconsistency. The author claims that the evangelical right is at odds with the pro-business, pro-wealth rest of the Republican Party (actually, as a moderate Republican, I no longer consider these extremists to be real Republicans–more like carpetbaggers). However, while claiming to be anti-greed, they appear to have cut a deal with Wall Street to share power.
The book ends with a sad discussion of how the evangelical right is all too wiling to spend tens of millions trashing the Clintons, but not at all interested in donating $25,000 to a poverty program.
The author concludes that seduction leads to insularity and insularity leads to deceit. He concludes that politics is not the answer, and a return to bottom up neighborhood level faith-based charity might do what politics cannot.
I put the book down with a diagram on the title page, a triangle, with faith at the top, the wealth of knowledge on the lower right, and the poor on the lower left. An arrow from faith to knowledge is labeled with a dollar sign. Our religions must fund the distribution of free cell phones and knowledge, this creates intelligence and usable information for the poor (see my review of C. K. Prahalad, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”), and this in turn converts the poor into good souls of faith.
I hold this author in the highest esteem. He spoke truth to the President (Karl Rove did NOT want him speaking that truth), and in giving us all this book, he has given us a bright shinining light on the future. I see this so clearly because of his work: stop funding politicians, start funding the poor's access to knowledge, unleash their entrepreneurship, and harvest their souls.
This is an utterly sensational book, easily in the top rank of the 770+ books I have reviewed here at Amazon, and together with David Johnston's books on “Faith-Based Diplomacy” and the book “The Left Hand of God,” one of the top three non-fiction books I would recommend to every person of faith.
