Customer Reviews

How To Destroy A Village: What The Clintons Taught A Seventeen Year Old

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

As a mom raising three boys during the nightmarish Clinton years, I welcome this "tome" describing my years as a car-pooling mom lunging for the radio to turn it off before the kids were subjected to the latest news of "cavorting Bill" or "his co-dependent Hillary". I remember telling my sons that "this is not the way men, especially presidents, act, and women with integrity do not tolerate this behavior, even to acquire power".
This book is an opportunity to read about those horrors from my kids' perspective.
The author is bright, and it's obvious that he had his eyes open even though the dominant media insisted on dispensing spin in lock-step with the party line.
Jason Fodeman is no limosine liberal.

This book takes a look at an aspect of politics we usually don't think about---- how the actions of politicians teach children lessons contrary to those taught by most parents. The book presents a well-researched look at various scandals during the Clinton Administration, governmental and media reaction to them, and, most importantly, the subtle messages they sent to children about accountability and truth.

What is truly amazing is that this book was written by a 17 year old high school student. The perspective is one we don't often see. Although my own political posture does not mirror the author's, I must agree with his overall premise. He has made some very thoughtful observations about American values.

The book is easy to read, and I highly recommend it.

A MUST READ book by young Westport CT author
Jason D. Fodeman...it is a fantastic book that should be read...

"How to Destroy a Village" What the Clintons taught a 17 year old...I recommend this book to all

I truly believe this is a young man who shows us just what the Clinton legacy has put in the minds of our children...Truth can be altered, money at any cost and what we have strived to teach our children isn't always what they learn. He has written a phenominal book. What more evidence do we need to see that the Clinton legacy has tarnished the young people of this country. We as adults can go back and forth on a day to day basis, one side defending while the other appalled, but when a young person actually takes a year out of his active life to let the American people see just what an effect the former President has had on him, how can we close a blind eye? I truly believe that Jason will get more than a few people to sit up and take notice.

What a shame the other reviews are about their own agenda's and not the brilliant work put forth by a high school student who was curious as to why his parents taught him one set of values and the Clinton's showed him another!..Try being a teen and weighing those two options!

This first book by an unusually erudite young intellectual is predictably his initial step in a career of inflicting righteous outrage upon public officials who fail their sworn duties, though this career will likely be part time, since the author's professional goal is in medicine.

From the outset, as I turned the pages of this compendium of outrages during the opprobrium of the Clinton years, I was reminded of numerous mendacities I had forgotten - the mind is very forgiving - but I am thankful that someone kept track. In this case, that someone must have started keeping track at about age eight or so!

The book's setting is a reminder of those values that all parents should imbue in their children, and it seems that the author remembers well how his parents taught those values. Then he reminds us just how the Clintons profaned those values. I found especially interesting his inclusion of consistency (and proper inconsistency, thus escaping the hobgoblin curse) among those values.

And Mr. Fodeman is quite careful about distinguishing between outright crimes committed by the Clintons and those that might be against the law. Sometimes, in fact, I think he tended to be overly forgiving on such knife-edge distinctions.

All in all, and despite some rather insignificant grammatical glitches, this is a very good read, and despite his complaints, he maintains a fine degree of civility. I expect to hear more from this promising young author.

It seems the only bad reviews for this book are coming from disgruntled liberals who probably didn't read it in the first place. Once again the Clinton apologizers miss the point. Before I get to the point of the book I must set the record straight for these revisionist liberals. Lying about sex isn't a criminal act unless you are lying about it under oath. What's even worse is that Clinton lied under oath when he was on trial for sexually harrassing another woman. It amazes me how liberals can't understand this fact.

Onto the book. Sure teen sex, lying, and cheating existed before President Clinton, but he certainly didn't help the situation. Clinton committed adultry, perjured himself, and lied to the American people, and he got away with everything. How does this look to kids and teenagers? I'll tell you how it looks. It looks like you can cheat on your wife and lie in court and you not only won't get in trouble, but you will be rewarded with the adoration of millions of people -- read lemmings -- and mult-million dollar book deals.

I can't believe that teacher wrote a review of this book and said teenagers aren't influenced by Clinton's acts. Give me a break. It may be hard to influence kids to do good, but it is certainly easy to influence them to do bad, especially if the President is doing the same things. Even if Clinton's crimes did not cause more teen sex, lying and cheating, it certainly gave teenagers a good excuse to justify their misdeeds.

By the Indie Pundit

This book should be read by any person who votes, or will be voting within the next 5 years. Jason Fodeman has taken published facts from both print and visual media and organized them according to topic and content. He then has expertly asked some very pointed questions that all of us should be asking ourselves. Is there a double standard for public figures in regards to values, morals, and ethics. Why do "adults" dismiss or look the other way for public figures? How can adults expect youth to not do the same? Just how unbiased is the media? Finally, Fodeman outlines why those 25 years and younger hold the views they do when it comes to politics, morals, values, and ethics. Anyone who would disagree needs to step foot is a high school or college classroom and really listen to this generation. Fodeman has the courage to tell it like it is, to tell what the american youth is trying to say, but very few "adults" are willing to listen to or accept.

Jason Fodeman demonstrated a mature talent in putting the ever deteriorating state of American values in the right perspective. Young age does not prevent Fodeman from demonstrating a keen understanding of complex issues that many authors do not know how, or are afraid, to address. America should applaud to an opportunity to hear a voice of the young generation. The modern liberals who deceive themselves as if they are true representative of the progressive force in the society are deceiving themselves misinterpreting their opposites. A modern conservative means not adherence to reactionary ideas, but to values that made the incredible phenomena of American democracy possible. It is nice to see that even a young generation understand this.I strongly recommend this book for all those who care for their childen and for those who want to see difficult, but, parodoxically, actually, simple matters, in the right scale of values.

This book is published by Publish America, not self published as a previous reviewer mistakenly declared. Publish America is not exactly Random House. But it is a far cry from self publishing. We wonder how many books the reviewer from Westport has ever had published.

Jason Fodeman demonstrates an unusually keen insight for a 17 year-old in his excellent expose of the Clinton Presidency. With literary precision he details facts surrounding the numerous scandals which characterized the Clintons during the President's two terms. Mr. Fodeman's contrast between the values imparted to him by his parents and grandparents which influence so much of who he is, with the Clinton's values for power, money, exploitation, greed, and lying, is striking. Page after page startles the reader into an awareness of how vulnerable young people could have been influenced so negatively by such powerful and influential people as the Clintons. Mr. Fodeman's style of writing and youhtful insights make this an appealing book for people of all ages who seek to understand the Clinton's influence on our culture.

More perhaps than with most books, it's difficult to separate the merits of "How to Destroy a Village" from the biography of its author. On its own, it's just one more recitation of the crimes of "the most ethical Administration in history" and the lasting stain it left on this country. Unreconstructed Clintonistas have all kinds of derogatory terms for such recitation, but there is unquestionable value in it ... especially in an election year.

But over and above its straightforward contents, what really makes this title interesting is the author, Jason Fodeman. It's rare, in my experience, to find a teenager so articulate (especially over the course of a sustained argument) or one who can research and marshal his facts so well. The book does in fact read like it was written by a seventeen year old, but under the circumstances this is authentic, not distracting. Fodeman is clearly still finding his voice and experimenting with language and expression. How many of us were so far along at his age?

That's why, if Amazon.com offered this feature, I'd give the book three stars, but the author four or even four-point-five.

Where I think Fodeman could have done a better job is in expanding his analysis beyond his own life and mindset to include a portrayal of his peers. His general method is to digest the facts of a particular Clinton scandal, and then to reflect on how the Clintons' immoral or unethical behavior differs from the principles his parents taught him. Though his arguments from logic are valuable, I also would have liked to see more concrete evidence of how (or whether) other kids were affected by the Clintons' negative moral or ethical examples.

Also, I wish his editor had done something to improve Fodeman's high-school-English-class typography. For anyone not using a manual typewriter, book and magazine titles are italicized, not underlined. And the "scientific" practice of citing sources in parenthesis at the end of every sentence is unnecessarily distracting -- especially when the same source is cited six times in succession, as on pages 173-175. God has blessed us with footnotes, and we should make use of them.

On the whole, this is an interesting addition to the five-foot shelf of books decrying what blogger Billy Beck has called "the Clinton Long March." Not the most ground-breaking, nor the one that will arouse the most passionate response from Slick's knee-jerk defenders, but certainly a perspective worth noting. As the reviews on this page show, reactions from both sides of the aisle are pretty much what you'd expect. Mostly, I'm looking forward to seeing whether Mr. Fodeman has anything else to write in the future.