Monday, February 27, 2023

Book Review Of The Day -- The Courage To Be Unfree (And Scary)

 


Fans of fascism!  Floriduh Gov. Ron "Meatball Ron/ Bootsie" DeSantis' new book, Mein Kampf  "The Courage to Be Free," is out!  The NYT's Jennifer Szalai has read it so we don't have to waste any more time on it.  Here are some of her observations, as distilled in Politico's Playbook, via Mock Paper Scissors:

— “[T]he overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.”

— “For the most part, ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”

— “Of his childhood baseball team making the Little League World Series, he says: ‘What I came to understand about the experience was less about baseball than it was about life. It was proof that hard work can pay off, and that achieving big goals was possible.’ You have to imagine that DeSantis, a double-barreled Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law School), put a bit more verve into his admissions essays.”

— “Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is chilling — unfree and scary.”

— “Reading books, even bad ones, can be a goad to thinking, but what DeSantis seems to be doing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is to insist that Americans should just stop worrying and let him do all the thinking for them. Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as ‘woke’ nonsense cooked up by the ‘corporate media.’ (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and News Corp, which owns the publisher of this book, doubtless don’t count.)”

Ouch and then some!  But you can be sure this will be a book Floriduh schools won't be banning!

(Photo:  a picture of Bootsie we'll never get tired of posting)


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