20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Should be a prison memoir!!!, June 26, 2007
This review is from: No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight (Hardcover)
Pathetic self justification from a man with no values who betrayed the conservative movement. In an ideal world this book would have been a prison memoir. Instead we the people must be satisfied that this grub has left the Congress.
Save your money and your time!
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33 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
bow to your sensei, May 19, 2007
This review is from: No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight (Hardcover)
The plot of this book is based loosely on the 1986 movie of the same name (
No Retreat, No Surrender). In the movie a young karate student hones his fighting skills by training with the ghost of Bruce Lee. He eventually becomes so good that he defeats the evil karate-master Ivan Krushensky, who is played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. In the book, the part of the student is played by Tom Delay, the part of Bruce Lee is played by Jesus, and Krushenky is played by Ronnie Earle. I enjoyed the movie, but I have to say that the book makes little sense -- why would someone who terminated life support for his own father make a big public stink about someone else's decision to terminate life support for his wife? Also I don't understand why Jesus would help someone who blamed the Columbine massacres on the teaching of biology in high school. I don't think Bruce Lee would have done that. The authors of the book should have followed the plot of the movie more closely.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Slogan Slinging Slop, September 29, 2007
This review is from: No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight (Hardcover)
I picked this book up on a whim at my local library. I had read a couple of politically oriented books at that time, one from a moderate republican's perspective and another from a more liberal perspective, so I thought it would be interesting to get insight into the thinking of the modern conservative.
I'm sure there are good intellectual arguments for the core principles of the modern conservative movement (on a surface level I tend to agree with a good number of them), but don't look for them in this book--they aren't there. While Mr. DeLay does list the core principles of the conservative movement from his perspective, he doesn't discuss them on an intellectual level. Instead, he resorts to the type of sloganeering that infects so much of our modern political discourse (convervatives and liberals alike).
Mr. DeLay starts by sharing his experience on a layover in Havana in 1959. He attributes the nasty treatment his family endured as leftist tyranny and asserts that liberalism in the US is just a precursor to the same thing. From there DeLay states what seem to be at the core of his belief system: "There is a God and...there is absolute moral truth" followed by "Human life is not about the state but about God and his unfolding will for every individual."
In the second chapter Mr. DeLay lists his political manifesto. It starts with his religious beliefs followed with some issue-specific agendas (e.g. abortion should be illegal, we should abolish certain government agencies, Congress should be able to overule the Supreme Court, etc). There wasn't any discussion, just a list.
Like many politicians at both extremes, Mr. DeLay's actions in congress at times violated his own principles when the outcome of an issue didn't suit him. For example, on page 5 Mr. DeLay says that state and local governments that are closest to the people have the greatest authority to shape their lives. In the case of Terri Shiavo, however, Mr. DeLay was eager to usurp the authority of the state government when the court upheld, after years and years of appeals, that the feeding tube should be removed from Terri Shiavo. A look at Mr. DeLay's voting record shows many instances of him voting on legislation in ways to contradict his stated core principles. Mr. DeLay seems to be a "the end justifies the means" kind of thinker.
Mr. DeLay makes some self-assessments in his book that I think were pretty accurate. He says that he isn't particularly introspective, he says he isn't an "idea" person, he states that he isn't very articulate, and he indicates he is a slow learner. I found myself agreeing with all of those statements when I finished the book.
The best part of this book was Mr. DeLay's description of how he worked the system to get legislation passed. Unfortunately it wasn't very detailed. I followed up my reading of the book with some wikipedia reading on the subject and got much more useful information.
The rest of the book rarely rises above sloganeering: liberals are evil people who want to take away our freedoms and destroy America. I can't recommend this book to liberals who are interested in understanding the intellectual underpinnings of modern conservative thought, and I can't recommend the book for conservatives either--they've heard the slogans before just like everyone else. I can, however, recommend the book as an example of the way shallow thinking and use selective evidence has distorted our political system. While this book is an example from the Right, there are plenty of examples from the Left too.
In the end, I'm glad I didn't spend money on it, but I'm disappointed I wasted time on it.
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