Book Notes: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, by Bernard Goldberg

Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters has three posts up on his recent interview with Bernard Goldberg - Summary, Part One, and Part Two. The focus of the posts is Goldberg's new book.


100 People Who Are Screwing up America (and Al Franken is #37)

From the Publisher (via Barnes & Noble):

In the process of becoming more tolerant, Goldberg says, America has become indiscriminately tolerant - tolerant of all sorts of garbage in our culture. And this is not the work of some vague, irresistible natural force. Specific people are to blame, and Goldberg names names. 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America is an important, hard-hitting, sometimes laugh-out-loud take on the individuals who are personally responsible for our current state of affairs.

A slow poison is running through America’s veins, says Bernie Goldberg. It’s a poison that is turning America into a far nastier place than it ought to be, a more selfish and cynical place, a less decent and civil place. It’s easy to believe that it’s nobody’s fault; that this is just the way society has evolved. But that’s not true. There are specific individuals who, in various ways, are screwing things up in this county - people who are changing America in ways that erode its very ethical and moral underpinnings.

100 People is about those villains - about the various poisons they spread and the damage each does. In short, this is a book about the very real people who are doing us very real harm - people who, Goldberg says, need to be held accountable.

In a series of short, punchy, sometimes funny chapters, Goldberg introduces the specific types: the Schlockmeisters, the Pinstripe Crooks, the Intellectual Thugs, the Hollywood Loudmouths, and the American Jackals, (a.k.a. The Out-for-Themsleves-Screw-Everyone-Else Lawyers). Then Goldberg names 100 of the worst - from people like Jerry Springer and Ludacris to Michael Moore and Al Franken.

This book will tap into a deep frustration that has been building in this country for years. It will be the voice for all those Americans who feel that no one is speaking for them on perhaps the most vital issue of all: the kind of country in which they want to live.