Customer Reviews

An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems

5 star:		(307)
4 star:		(69)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(64)

 

 

Let me say first that I'm not reviewing Glenn Beck's politics or his character. I think his radio show is great fun, and his life story is inspirational, but this book to me was ultimately disappointing.

Now, the full color printing and the little cartoon and blurb asides on most every page make for a very attractive and fun book to read. The extra cost and effort to produce stuff like this is not lost on me. This is likely the most attractive book by a political media pundit that I've ever seen.

The main problem is that this book is full of facts and figures, and many of them are unreferenced. For example, on page 7 the author writes that the increase in the amount of coal that China will burn will send as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 3 billion Ford Expeditions driven 15,000 miles a year.

That's funny, but where did he get this? Where's the little number that points to the notes at the end of the chapter, or the book, that tell me the source that he cited? I haven't found it yet.

Political media pundits are great for raising issues and directing our attention to things we may have never have though of before, but they are not primary sources of information, and they should not pretend to be.

So, I quote this figure above to one of my liberal acquaintances, and s/he says, "that's funny, where did you learn that?" And I say, "that new Glenn Beck book". And s/he says "ha ha ha ha ha". And I can't back up what I said. So much for the war of ideas.

So, full color printing and cartoons and little blurbs and all that fun stuff were not too inconvenient for this book, but rigerous referencing of the stats presented to make arguements apparently was too inconvenient for this book. Ann Coulter's writings may be caustic, even in the extreme, but at least she is careful to cite her sources. I wish this author would do the same.

I am a conservative and like to watch the show but the book is a disapointment. There are no footnotes or references to any of his stats or statements. The only good thing I can say about this book is it has nice pictures but not much meat for readers.

The book covers plenty of topics with varying degrees of quality & quantity. I believe parts are done totally in a tongue in cheek manner.

Chapters 1-22 have the following titles. "Global Warming, Marriage & Porn, Islam, Body Image, Blind Dating, Income Gap, Oil Dependence, Liberal Universities, Political Games, Movie Rentals, Media Bias, Political Correctness, Tipping, Pedophiles, The UN, Remembering Names, Minimum Wage, Aging, Opinion Polls, Poverty, Parenting, & Illegal Immigration."

This book is not meant to be as rich in detail or as thorough as say Pat Buchanan's "Day Of Reckoning," so the 1-2 star reviewers should lighten up a bit. Nor is it as political as the reader may have thought.

Mr. Beck bases his views on common sense{an oxymoron if there ever was one}, his moral code, & life experience.
I will focus on the most relevant chapters. Ch-3 on Radical Islam could not be more spot on. Ninety percent of Muslims are peace loving, law abiding people. But, it is also true that the majority have been intimidated so as not to speak out against the minority of those who are twisting their faith for evil ends.

Indeed, Mr. Beck is correct, "we should sweat the small stuff." We should also reinstate the first amendment & toss Political correctness in the dust bin of discredited & absurd ideologies. On page 44, do we really want to become France? A country that has practically allowed for small Muslim states to exist within their borders with tiny effort to have them assimilate. However, unlikely the prospect of that occuring here, it is food for thought?
Ch-6 John Edwards is practicing class warfare, but he is partially correct about the income gaps having widened. Page 83, yes indeed, we "all are created equal." At least under the law that is.

What we do with our lives is mainly our own choice. Page 85, how shocking that the NYTimes twisted the facts by not mentioning that the income tax code has changed over the decades??? Anyone who is surprised by that must be truly gullible. The stats on page 88 could not be truer. Ch-7 page 99, sorry Mr. Beck the Russians never called their empire "Byzantine." the latter was Greek in culture & language. While the government, military, & law codes were thoroughly Roman. Page 101, yes president Carter deserves credit for trying to cut our imports & use of oil. Pages 104-7 are true, if we have the will we can solve our energy problems.

Ch-8 may be the truest one in the book? We as a society should dump tenure at all of our schools, including Universities. Everyone should be accountable in the workforce. Why should folks in education be given a pass?
It would also end the monopoly the political left has had for generations on our campuses. Ch-9 pages 128-9 are sad, but its time for we Americans to say "MEA CULPA"-pronounced {May-ah-coolpah}= my fault. Ch-14 pages 184-5, amazing that we as a country are doing the right things to reduce the perverts access to our kids. Ch-15 page 189, Kofi Annan's statement was right. Yes, the USA. leaving the United Nations which was badly set up in the first place is fine with me. Ch-20 page 257, could be true? That could explain much of the problems we face. Ch-22, we as a people can solve the illegal immigration by punishing the employers. That is the key to reversing the trend. In conclusion, however satirical & simple the book is at times{I did not expect Mr. Beck to be a younger William F. Buckley}. Mr. Beck has common sense & that alone deserves four stars.

Glenn Beck does his readers a service by suggesting that we get to the facts behind all those opinions and assertions that bombard us daily . . . and the ones we hold that we haven't looked into in about 20 years. He is at his best when pointing out the weaknesses of polls, statistics, and arguments made to push certain political positions.

His idea of humor reminds me in places of the kind of outrageousness that was popular in high school for flaunting authority. The humor works best when he has a sound underpinning of a suggestion for a better idea (as he does in several cases). Otherwise, it's just blowing off steam (a rant, in other words). I find rants (even humorous ones) to be boring so they didn't work very well with me.

The parts of the humor that I found very effective were the moronic quotes of people who either didn't understand what they were saying or displayed hidden motives in public.

Where he gets into trouble is where he doesn't know enough to take a position apart but thinks he does. I admire him for trying, but arguments based on charts displaying correlations just don't prove anything unless you can also show a cause-and-effect relationship. I suggest he get some people to help him who can take the time to pull these issues apart at a little more fundamental level.

I would recommend that those who don't normally question their political beliefs take a look at this book. It's a template for how to check your own thinking by doing a little research . . . something we should all do more of.

I had never heard of Glenn Beck before reading his book so I didn't have a prior opinion of him as an on-air performer.

I also haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, so I don't know how accurate his satire of Al Gore is.

I found his humility about explaining his prior mistakes to be refreshing and praiseworthy.

I could really relate to his description of what it's like to have a guy show up to pick up your daughter for a date.

If he gets someone to check his work a little more carefully and finds a few more solutions, Glenn Beck could be quite a positive force.

Picking up this book will give the reader some quick impressions. The book's size and paper texture is more like a colorful high school text. Beck loves to ham up his image either in caricature or photograph, and he does his best to come across as the common sense sage dispensing wit and wisdom like the coverall-ed old codger does from the rocking chair of his front porch. He also seems to think that he possesses a fine sense of humor.

He makes a number of "confessions" in his tome, which give me the impression that he is a man who thinks he knows what he's talking about rather than one who does. He states often enough phrases like, "I'm no scientist, but...." or "Now, I'm no economist but I know the law of supply and demand," or "...the Frenchy-French school of economics," (which make me wonder if he has any credentials at all). Then, Glenn spills out his common sense for the reader to swallow. In fact he tells us that his education beyond high school consisted of going to the library to read about one topic, then returning to read about someone with a contrarian's view of the same. Beck proudly announces this as a qualification of some form of evenhandedness.

While I admit that I have respect for admission of alcoholism and his continuing recovery from it, it's hard not to be turned off by a man, whose evenhandedness and horse sense resulted in, by his own admission, firing someone for having handed him the wrong pen. He further reveals a lack of imagination in telling us, what is now ad nauseam, the conservative "needle's stuck" about Senator Byrd's membership in the Ku Klux Klan back in 1947.

All right, Glenn. We get it already. Give it a rest, will ya? Move on to Senator Craig and family values, or something.

While assuming a mantle of objectivity, Beck reveals the hypocrisy of Congress in the form of democrats who have failed to do one thing or another, or "abandoned" life-long friendships by giving their support to the new party senatorial candidate in Connecticut. Nowhere does he tell us about Foley, Cunningham, Nye, or the nefarious Tom Delay, or how republicans have made candidates tow the party line or be abandoned by it. This example is so shallow; it reveals Beck as nothing more than a man with an agenda proposing a different point of view while dispensing his common sense to problems.

His book goes from why the minimum wage is flawed, and why CEO's command the salaries that they do to a host of other real and mundane subjects. His views sometime border on the simple-minded. He tells us of college professors who are bad, all four or five of the one he lists, and then generalizes to the whole university population. He even offers us a ridiculous statistic of how many are liberal but don't believe in God. He never quite makes a point with that one.

Never delving completely in a topic, Beck states the problem and then offers his solution. Neither is extraordinarily detailed. His evidence is sometimes anecdotal, and his conclusions are based upon limited information and even more limited assumptions. But most importantly, I keep questioning the man whose education included trips to the library. Toss in his consistent quips about democrats and you have a person who loses credibility as a trustworthy source.

To his credit, Beck is not like a Limbaugh or Hannity who feign indignation with their self-righteous conservative anger while misleading their audiences. Both could take a lesson from the author who comes off as less of a propagandist. But in the end, Beck becomes just another in a long list of conservative pundits who is very engaging but not very profound or original. Someone needs to tell him that complex problems cannot be solved by his "simple" solutions.

My best friend of twenty-four years gave me this book.

I think I'm going to fire him.

This book reads like a collection of extended sound bites from Glenn Beck's television and radio shows. It is perfect for someone who does not like to dwell on anyone thing for very long. The focus on a given subject is brief. The writing team jumps around among a great diversity of subjects in the space of a few pages.
The lack of an index and bibliography and not taking the time to determine the sex of The Governor (yes she is a Democrat but that is no excuse) of our Great Evergreen State of Washington (see page 151) indicates that this work was slapped together in haste.
The two stars are for some of the sensible viewpoints and political positions briefly expressed the various sound bites in print.

Glenn Beck has written a book that is scary, funny, informative, and even trivial. It is a great combination of being important as well as hilarious.

Mr. Beck covers issues ranging from global warming and illegal immigration to body image and blind dating. It is hard to conceive how he includes such diverse topics in a single volume, but he manages to do it very well.

I'll touch on some of the areas covered:

The scary
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The politically incorrect movement and how it enables radical Islam to establish strong footholds in the U.S. prison system and elsewhere in the nation. Must read chapters.

America's oil dependence - For those who are concerned about gasoline at $3.00/gallon, it is only going to get worse. This is not all negative though; the author has some good solutions.

Illegal immigration - This is not about racism or keeping people from bettering themselves. Beck does a great job of putting this into perspective and has some great ideas.

The Funny
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The chapter on blind dating is hilarious. It helps to lighten up some weighty subjects in other parts of the book.

The Informative
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Most of the book falls into this category. There are some of these parts that deserve special mention. For example, Beck's chapter on the minimum wage is really simplified to help anyone be able to understand it. So many people seem to not understand the basic economics of this issue, but Glenn does a superb job on it. He has a very powerful visual to aid readers on page 218.

Radical Islam is another area that he covers very well. This section is packed full of information. He summarizes it very well: "It's about politics, not religion." This part is very well done.

Marriage and Divorce - Not only does he put the statistics into perspective, he makes it very clear what the risk factors are and how couples can avoid divorce. He backs it up with data.

Global Warming - This is another must read chapter. The author does a great job of documenting much of the nonsense around the hysteria on this subject. As one could tell from the title of the book, this is a key point in the book.

One excellent thing that he does is document how the fearmongers in the media and elsewhere, have created an alternating cycle of scares about global cooling and global warming. He talks about the global cooling scare of the 1970s. He has great quotes on opposite ends of the spectrum from Newsweek in 1975 and The Washington Post in 2006. These quotes on in chapter one set the stage for the global warming lesson.

He goes on to say: 'But the global-cooling age was far from the first climate scare. The New York Times wrote scary articles about cooling in 1924, warming in 1935, back to cooling in 1975, and, of course, warming again today.' This part alone will help those who buy the media hysteria hook, line, and sinker. Those who are terrified of global warming should also read State of Fear by Michael Crichton. State of Fear

The Trivial
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Beck has a section on tipping that many will agree with, but this falls more into the category of a pet peeve than a serious issue.

This is really a great book. It informs and entertains at the same time. That is a real rarity. Do yourself a favor and buy it.

If you want to read this book for a few good laughs or to have a good reference for conservative talking points it will probably serve you well.

But the book is promises to take a no-nonsense look at the issues and Beck, unfortunately, isn't the man with all the answers. That probably isn't surprising since we shouldn't expect one man to be an expert on every contentious issue, but we might expect one to pretend to be to sell books.

The bottom line is that Beck didn't do his homework, doesn't have enough training in economics or statistics to deal with most questions in social science, and seems to beg the question on most issues. He writes like a man who takes a side and then searches for evidence to confirm his beliefs, ignoring things he doesn't like or that make him rethink his position. This is typical behavior in debates and can be good fun, but since the book is premised on overcoming these very basic fallacies it gets 1 star.

IN HIS BOOK, there is not one source. When reading this book, check your sources. Do not buy his book. Glenn Beck, I demand that you source all stuff in your book. Glenn Beck has lost his credibility. It is an entertaining book.

I will admit at the beginning that I am a fan of Glenn Beck's radio and TV shows, so some will dismiss this highly positive review of the book as ignorantly following Beck's lead. I assure you my review is based on what I read.

And what I read was highly entertaining, and informative.

On every page, there is at least one item that will make you laugh, whether it be a cartoon, a line of prose, or one of Glenn's "ADD Moments." The hard part was deciding whether to read the chapter or read the asides first!

All in all, it was highly refreshing, interesting, funny, challenging, and quick to read. Don't believe the 1-star reviews. Anybody can get something good from "An Inconvenient Book."