| Title: | America: The Book: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction | |
| Author: | Writers of The Daily Show | |
| Rating: |  |
I've been slogging through this one for a long time now. Others have given it glowing reviews. Alas, I must be hugely out of touch with modern culture. I didn't laugh aloud even once while reading this. I rarely even cracked a smile.
To say the humor is heavy handed would be putting it mildly.
To say it made me sad - on a number of fronts - would be accurate.
I guess my biggest problems were (a) just how often the book descended into bathroom humor and (b) how often the non-bathroom humor was too close to the truth for me to be comfortable. An example of the latter issue: chapter 3 is titled "The President: King of Democracy". Has anyone actually watched the Bush administration accumulate power?
I found the book's layout - parodying high school civics class textbooks - to be mildly amusing, but only in that it showed me just how bad the layout of my old textbooks was. How I read those books - with all those asides and distractions - I'll never know,
Anyway, I found America: The Book to be somewhat repetitive, not particularly funny, and sometimes too close to reality to even be considered humor. I'm glad I got it through http://www.paperbackswap.com/ so it didn't really cost me anything. I'll send it on to someone else.
