Customer Reviews

George & Martha

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An ideal summer read for the alternatively-minded: brisk, hilarious, and smart as all hell. Pass it along!

a must read! an outrageous story of sex and politics, as only karen finley could tell. read it. pass it on.

George & Martha is hilarious, filled with wonderful illustrations and crazy scenarios. Karen Finley's smart and radical idea of George W. Bush and Martha Stewart having an on-going affair is brilliant. Their somewhat twisted relationship manages to capture all that's currently wrong with this country. Politically smart and sexually charged it's laugh out loud funny but cry inside tragic. Read this book!

Riffing on Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?' and the mama and daddy of our country, George and Martha paints a brief portrait of George W. and Martha Stewart's complicated love affair. The two icons of global crisis and domestic comfort talk, drink, fight, love, and reveal their respective hard and soft spots on a hideous polyester bedspread in a hotel room. This is devestating and biting satire on the order of Steven Colbert's recent performance White House Correspondents Dinner. It's incredibly funny, - but um, why aren't we laughing? The book includes hundreds of illustrations also by Finley. I loved it!!

This is a very short book which can be read in about 2 hours. Karen Finley is a professor of art and public policy in a New York academic setting. It appears that Finely is using the art of satire to explore two boundaries; taboo sexual expression and respect for conservative political leaders. recently I read a good book on transgression in art. The author identified three types of transgressions in art: transgressions against the definition of art, transgressions against current notions of morality, and transgressions against the state. This short book is primarily a work of transgression against the state, using transgression against moral sexual behavior to reinforce her attack on the political status quo. Whereas President Bush is attacked as the political leader, Martha Sewart is attacked as the symbol of upper middle class values and morality.

Finley is a bright artist, she is aware of the transgressions and boundaries which she explores. She explores two transgressions against current sensibilities, that of exploring moral sensibility and taboo sexuality and combining that transgression with exploring the inner psyche of President George W Bush. She does this through an odd tale of a night of odd dialogue and pleasure between Martha Stewart and President Bush on the night before she must report to prison.

The sex gets kinky fast, complete with baby wipes and diapers. But Finley always weaves a tale where the sexual perversions are a bi-product of Ms. Stewart and President Bush's inner psychopathology. As Ms. Stewart and the President discuss Iraq, Dick Cheney, the first President Bush and his wife Barbara, Condoleza Rice, etc. we see Finley's world view come into focus. The same kinky psychopathology that guides the President's sex life also guides his political philosophy and foreigh policy. His lack of substantive analysis, as if he had attention deficit disorder, influences his sexual behavior and his political philosophy.

Thus Finley's work is political rebellion at its core. She uses humor, sexuality, and psycho-babble dialogue to undermine the idealogy that drives the current President and she is asking the reader to also question the President's assumptions that influence all of our lives.

At times extremely funny, at other times gross with too many bodily function details, and at other times dark satire aimed at the President's vast vulnerabilities; this book would confirm that the President is a second rate intellect to those that hate him but would be incredibly shocking to those that follow him and the ideology to which he clings.

I predict a scandal in the making here. Whereas the President and his camp would probably not attack Ms. Finley openly in the press or news shows, some conservative groups will find this book and make it a national scadal. Of course, a scandal does wonders for an artist and for book sales, so Finley may be wishing that her little book raises the roof - as they say, she will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Very few have the ability to expose our culture's psychosocial underbelly as incisively and intuitively as Karen Finley. Her hilarious satire of a love affair between George W. Bush and Martha Stewart not only provides much-needed comic relief in distressing times, but also excavates the pathology of two individuals reflective of and dominant in the national psyche.

No doubt, it's a lewd and shocking bit of literature. But in contrast to the corruption of US politicians and the country's pervasive sexism, Finley's latest diatribe is wholesome and and utterly in defense of morality.

Of all the books I have ever owned this is probably the least worth reading. While Karen Finley is sometimes brilliant and incisive, this story is not. The sexual descriptions in the book are obscene, as are the pictures, without any discernible artistic purpose (particularly when you consider that this was originally a play). It might make you laugh, but only to avoid crying. When you're done reading, you'll wonder why you did. My advice is to choose something/anything else to spend an afternoon reading.