The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank
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Book Reviews of The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
Book Review: Worth a second look
Summary: 3 Stars
If McCain had won in November, and what a relief it is that he didn't, then this book would have been a runaway bestseller like What's the Matter with Kansas? was in 2005. Then, Frank correctly predicted that the Republicans would win and explained why. In this book he appears to assume that the Republicans would win again, and since they didn't it might seem as if the book is irrelevant. What Frank should have said is that even if Obama wins, as he duly did, nothing much will really change in Washington, because Washington is Washington. And this much is true as Obama's usual suspects appointments more than bears out. So it should really be retitled as this is how Washinton works irrespective of who is in power. Read that way it is a powerful reminder of just how much needs to actually change before we truly get some of that change we can believe promised on inauguration day Jan 2009. This is an important book and should be better known in the UK and elsewhere than it is -- I've given it 3 stars, however, because in contrast to the previous work it does not explain how things have gotten to be as they are, and that is of course the question that really matters right now.Book Review: Clear, cogent, and alarming
Summary: 5 Stars
I got hold of a pre-publication copy of the book, and thus did not see the diagrams, or the fully corrected version. Nevertheless, there was certainly enough there in the not-quite-final form to enable one to read the book appraise it, and have one's socks knocked off.
As Frank makes brightly, if painfully, clear, is that the mess that has been wrought during this administration is not principally the consequence of good-hearted incompetence--George W. Bush is NOT to be taken to be a well-meaning, but undereducated and incompetent yokel, but the embodiment of something a lot darker and more ill-meaning. Frank makes it clear that mess after mess was foreseen, engineered, and in some cases, enthusiastically welcomed by the conservative hitmen who have been at the helm of the ship of state.
THE WRECKING CREW makes a good companion piece with Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. Add in Jeremy Scahill's BLACKWATER and Jane Mayer's THE DARK SIDE, and you will have a vivid, although profoundly disquieting picture of the extent of the illegal, unethical, and possibly irremediable harm that this administration has inflicted upon us.
Book Review: No Happy Ending
Summary: 5 Stars
The Wrecking Crew is not one of those books that ends with a happy-talk chapter: All we need to fix things is A...., B....., C......, etc.
Mr. Frank is blunt. Whenever there's a choice between money and the common good, conservatives will always choose money. There can never be democracy when there's great inequality of wealth because a plutocracy always buys the government. Period.
However, this was not a depressing read to me. It cleared away once and for all the idea that the awful things done these last 25 years in and to government just sort of happened. (No, it was all a calculated approach to defund the left. And the use of deficits to defund the left had the added advantage of letting conservatives spend wildly to keep well oiled the revolving door.)
Mr. Frank doesn't beat up on the Dems but he makes inevitable the realization that not a few Democratic pols still want to think politics is being played in a fair arena.
As in all of Mr. Frank's work the writing is graceful with concrete imagery.
Book Review: Say that Again?
Summary: 1 Stars
I read one-third into the book and just couldn't keep going. Maybe I'm guilty of wanting instant gratification, but I just could not get the point of trudging through the minutae and mire of several decades of the history of conservatism, i.e., Republican Party politics, according to the author.
Although author Thomas Frank seems enthusiastically self-absorbed in the dire consequences of this or that political immorality, I had to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks. If an author can't grab my attention in this space of time, I'm not going to continue reading. I wholeheartedly agree with a previous reviewer, ChrisWN; he just had more patience to more elequently reflect my own opinion.
The above is not to say that I fundamentally disagree with the author's objective in writing the book. I have seen him interviewed on Bill Moyers' Journal twice and fully support his views about government, the economy, political history and parties. But I still find the book a bore.
Book Review: this book will boil your blood.
Summary: 5 Stars
first of all, thomas frank is a very talented writer. he has a knack for answering your next thought or question.
i always suspected conservatives were trying to privatize stuff but i never realized how deep their hatred of a government "for the people" was. it all makes sense now, the blocks on unemployment extensions, end of the world lamenting if the minimum wage is increased, fighting regulation on wall street and banking, defending the worst health care system in the industrialized world, protecting murderers and mass polluters like massey industries and bp. privatizing war so it may never end. filling the epa, labor, dept. of interior, etc., etc., with business lobbyists and lawyers...
i like most didn't know their whole purpose was to literally gut the federal government of any power.
i'm on a new mission. the people must know. conservatives are gutting our government while blaming liberals for their wreckage.