| TAKE IT BACK Our Party, Our Country, Our Culture James Carville & Paul Begala New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7752-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-7432-7752-X | 349pp. | HC/GSI | $24.00 | |
| Page 1: | "Turbo-charged by complacency, folly, and incompetence, Katrina destroyed a great city, transforming New Orleans into a septic stew of floating bodies, roaming gangs, disease, and toxic slime. The storm launched a wave of refugees not seen in the United States since the Dust Bowl, and the damage inflicted on crucial energy and transport infrastructure sent ripples throughout the economy." |
| This is a bit florid. However, it is essentially accurate: Katrina's effects would not have been so disastrous without the contributions of defective levees, poor disaster preparations, and incompetent responses on the part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. |
| Page 20: | "Over two decades, Thomas McGovern, has pieced together a picture of just how bad life became..." |
| Extra comma: S/B "Thomas McGovern has". |
| Page 74: | "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." |
| This quote from Matthew 6:6 has substituted one word for another: S/B "who is in heaven". |
| Page 132: | "...Darryl is buff and ready to kick some Iraqi tail." |
| Both "tail" and "butt" are euphemisms for ass. In my vernacular, though, "tail" means a female ass, and thus is wrong in this instance: S/B "kick some Iraqi butt". |
| Page 176: | "What did he come up with? Sending Americans back to the moon—something we first did back in 1969, and then four times after that." |
| Actually, there were six landings on the Moon — Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 & 17. So this S/B: "five times". |
| Page 203: | The story about Al Gore and Love Canal |
| The authors don't make it clear how Love Canal comes into the picture, since Gore is misquoted about a toxic waste site in his home state of Tennessee. |
| Page 225: | "Net-roots activists are properly disgusted when D.C. Democrats cave in to corporate lobbyists on tax cuts, or on the new bankruptcy that screws the poor..." |
| Missing word: S/B "the new bankruptcy law". |
| Page 281: | "Why aren't we—the party of change and progress—the ones championing the use of technology for something other than nudie pictures?" |
| This is a cheap shot at the Internet. The authors should know better, since they've already praised blogs and Howard Dean's use of the 'Net for fund-raising. |
| Pages 295-6: | "Wednesday, August 31, 2005 ... President Bush participates via videoconference in a large meeting of federal, state, and local disaster management officials preparing for the storm's onslaught." |
| Since the storm (Hurricane Katrina) had already made its onslaught by this time, "onslaught" seems the wrong word. Perhaps S/B: "the storm's aftermath". |
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