Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I will admit upfront, in the interest of context, that I would have voted for Sanders if given the chance. But I live in the Midwest, am a sexagenarian, and understand the angst that put Trump in the White House. I bought this book for a simple reason: I am greatly disillusioned by the current political climate. Neither party, in my humble opinion, has anything close to a viable plan for moving ahead. Nonetheless, I remain committed to the enlightened tradition of old-fashioned listening (or reading, as it were). The book is well written and Pirro makes many very well argued points. She is right that Trump can’t get a break with the media, that the Deep State, of every stripe, is hurting American interests, our political leaders are hypocritical on any number of fronts, and that Americans, in the end, are the ones left to suffer by the continuous posturing of the political and commercial elite who now control the political process. At the same time, as one who worked as an American business executive in China for many years, she’s not entirely right. The current administration shows little understanding of how international trade actually works and its raw form of cowboy diplomacy will isolate us in the world and bring down our economy and our influence. Trump’s right that not everyone likes us but every nation has respected what we stood for. And that—not tariffs and bullying—is what made America great. The language and the prose are caustic and inappropriately personal. And that detracts from the book in the same way that preventing administration officials from enjoying a quiet meal in public does. Incivility only begets more incivility. Our parents taught us better. Whatever your political profile, you should read the book. It’s almost guaranteed that you will be cheering in the streets or cussing under your breath. Either way, it’s a decent book and Pirro deserves to be heard. In the end, however, I believe this book will do little to bring us together. It will be chum to foes and critics alike. And in that regard little will come of it. No one, it seems, really has an answer for moving forward. The reason, I increasingly suspect, is that people are not the problem; the institutions themselves are. They’re broken, or at least out of alignment, and until we address them the noise is going to be over-whelming, but not particularly productive. For starters, we need to get the money out of politics. Until we do all of the abuses that Pirro and her critics point to are all going to continue. We end up cheering for one team or another but the game remains rigged. Pirro deserves to be heard and this is a legitimate book by a very legitimate author. I don’t like the mud-slinging any more than I like it from the other side, but it is the unfortunate norm today.