Customer Reviews

Good People Beget Good People: A Genealogy of the Frist Family

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This is a fascinating study of the extraordinary mix of in-breeding, animal sacrifice, and corruption required to produce the world's worst human being. Coming from a family of mildly despicable cheats, the Frists had a leg up on normal human beings...but it still took an enormous amount of laboratory work and careful training to produce not just a self-involved twit but an unspeakable monster.

This book is Frankenstein of our century, a marvellous account of the line between science and morality, and the "Dr. Frist" character is a chilling reminder of the true evil inherent in all humanity...even if readers will find Dr. Frist himself an impossibly overdrawn character. Surely, no actual human could be so evil. Neverthless, he stands like Shelley's monster as an emblem of the path we as a species must never take.

By damning this "Dr. Frist" character and the bizarre process that created him, this sterling work serves as a moral guide, a hope for the future.

Really, this has got to rank as one of the worst excuses for biography ever written. So Bill Frist's family is supposedly melanin-free... so what? Is that their sole claim to being "good people"? What else have they done to justify these hundreds of pages of poorly written prose? The only positive benefit of this yawn-inducing snoozathon is that it's a surefire remedy for terminal insomnia. You'll be bored into a coma in no time at all.

Senator Frist is a prime example of what generations of corruption, greed, and aristocratic inbreeding will inevitably produce. Kidnapping and experimental evisceration of cats was just one of his early formative career choices. After making obscene amounts of money with investments in pharmeceutical companies and his own private HMO (which was well noted for its ability to turn a profit, provided the insured could be persuaded not to seek medical coverage of any kind), he did what any talentless plutocrat will do: Move on to politics. There, when he isn't destroying America's democratic republic, he continues to mis-diagnose the brain-dead through video, display a pre-Mandelian view of the transmission of disease (to wit, HIV), and is currently under investigation for insider trading. Indeed, rather than the ironically redundant repetition of "Good People" in the title of this book, "Doctor" Frist would have been more accurate if he'd titled it, "The Aristocrats". (For reference, see the movie of the same name. But not near children. Or when your boss might be watching.)

Odd, poking at a library database (a big one, because most libraries can't be prevailed on to buy this sort of thing) reveals that there was a book, of the same arrogant and desperation-inducing title (I mean, I don't know about you, but I've had some BAD people among my antecedents; will we, corporately taken, ever make GOOD?) written & published about "Thomas F. Frist, Sr.", presumably the good daddy of good Bill, and written by some operator named Karl F. VanDevender. And now we have this new edition, written by, it says, "William H. Frist and Shirley Wilson". Now, what's the story here? Is the ostensibly GOOD William H. Frist UN-good enough to have plagiarized his very own daddy's book (and it was a GOOD daddy too) and passed it off as his own? (Let's forget the business about Shirley Wilson; I suppose he PAID her to actually write the thing, and a contract is a contract, there's nothing GOOD or BAD about it.)
I suppose it all had something to do with going from the medical business, these days in such disrepute, what with nobody being able to afford seeing a doctor and getting no results when they do, and going into the even MORE disreputable business of politics. What? You say it will get better, that is to say, MORE GOOD, when GOOD people, begotten by GOOD people, get into it? That's GOOD! So, just in case there was a mistake, don't just settle for a GOOD person. Make sure that it was a GOOD person, who was sired and dammed and GOODLY begotten, by GOOD persons, who had GOOD thoughts while they were begetting this GOOD person. And, for full measure of GOODNESS, make sure the GOOD person was born in a GOOD place, in the middle of a GOOD country, and there's only one that can be counted on to be GOOD, namely America. But, just to make sure, get the GOOD person is a reliably GOOD state, like the State of Tennessee. That will be GOOD, even if you're NO GOOD yourself.
[...]

How to be an inside trader, how to whine like a crybaby when he doesn't get his way. Oh and his video diagnosis technique.

Do Good People Beget Lying Insider Traders?, September 24, 2005
Reviewer: Maezeppa (California) - See all my reviews
This book bears further scrutiny based on the recent revealations Frist dumped vast amounts of family stock just ahead of the plunge. Frist is on the record denying being in possession of any prior knowledge about the company's status. Unfortunately, phone and other records prove otherwise. Oops. Considering the fact that Frist is a public figure, that the money involved was a far larger amount than the one involved in the Martha Stewart case and the fact that the lie is so recent and fresh he cannot claim a faulty memory, it makes one wonder if this "Good People" will do "Hard Time".

Wow. That sure is a purty house there on the cover. Must be some good people begetting there.

Great people do not hide from U.S. citizens the fact that during the 1990s and beyond, children were overdosed on mercury via routine childhood vaccinations. Great people help little children recover from mercury-induced autism, attention deficits, tics and other mental and physical illnesses. And great people do not defraud Medicare and get fined $640 million. The Frists are a greedy, self-serving family and Senator Bill belongs in prison.

The Frist Family vanity publication is laughably stultifying and content-free. Once upon a time "gimme cash, evade campaign reporting" - type tomes were actually subatantive but "Profiles in Courage" this ain't. Come to think of it, "It Takes a Village" is freakin' Margaret Mead compared to this piece of yuck.
At least Fritz explains why he killed the kittens he [...] acquired from animal shelters. [...]

Come on Bill, just cut to the chase and make the book $1,000 a pop. It'll save us a lot of landfill and help you with the defense fund.