The first complete book I read using the iPhone Kindle app is Bernard Goldberg's A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. I paid the standard "new book" Kindle price of $9.99, which given the length of the book (very short) and the lack of new insight, I consider about $7 too much.
And maybe three bucks is being too kind, not because there's no insight in this book, but because there is absolutely not one word or fact that any reader of non-liberal blogs wouldn't have been aware of for months by now. Using Google to do a review of blog posts on the mainstream media's treatment of Obama would get you as much or more information in short order at no cost.
And frankly, that's what I recommend you do if you are curious about the subject.
It seems to me there are two potential audiences for this book. The first audience is those people who weren't obsessively reading blogs throughout the campaign season, who are not "in the tank" liberals, and who now want to understand how our President came to be elected. The second is the people of the future: Those who, years or decades hence, want to look back on and understand this election. Unfortunately, neither of these audiences is served, for pretty much the same reason.
That is, this book strangely assumes a pretty intimate knowledge of the just-completed campaign. So it's preaching to people who by definition already know the details. Two key examples:
Joe the Plumber: Goldberg devotes a "chapter" to Joe (where chapter is defined as a couple of pages, near as I could tell, having to judge while reading in a format not conducive to communicating page count) in which he does not explain little details like:
Who Joe the Plumber is.
How he came to interact with Obama.
What questions he asked of Obama.
How he ended up a public figure.
Why the media and the left felt he was important enough to publicly destroy (beyond the simple statement that he was going after their candidate).
What's left is a jumble of mini-facts about how the media went after Joe for not being a plumber and for owing back taxes. Any reader not fully versed in who Joe is will be left bewildered about why this chapter is even in the book and will come away not one whit more clueful about the situation. It reads like some notes thrown together and included in the book by accident.
Sarah Palin: While Goldberg provides a bit more content about Palin, it's still a scattered mess lacking context. He launches into a list of things the media called her without any summary of her history, her political views, how she was introduced to the country, why people were surprised by her inclusion on the ticket, etc. He references Andrew Sullivan's conspiracy theory about Trig not being Palin's child without having previously mentioned who Trig is, explaining what the conspiracy theory was, providing a single detail debunking it, or discussing how this bizarre theory came about or held on.
Suffice it to say this is no The Making of the President, 1960 or even The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate.
I regret that I didn't post a review of David Freddoso's excellent Case Against when I read it, and perhaps I'll go back and rectify that soon. For our current purposes, suffice it to say that given an author who I was warned was a wacko partisan, I was pleasantly surprised to find that his book was no screed. It was instead a calm fact-filled look at the political history of Obama, providing insight on the man and politician through well-researched history organized in an engaging and in-depth manner. Its only agenda and conclusion (spoiler!) was to call on the reader to treat Obama as a politician like any other politician, which is what he is. This is a book that in years hence researchers and academics will be able to reference and learn from (not that they will, but they could!). This is a book that anyone, no matter how well-versed going in, is likely to learn a number of new things from.
Goldberg's book, on the other hand, may well leave you knowing less than you did before you started reading it.
If you feel this review is overly short and doesn't provide nearly enough information about what Goldberg covers...well, then you know exactly how I felt on finishing his book.
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