Customer Reviews

You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Molly Ivins is smart, thoughtful, funny, and well armed with the facts. I wish I could carry her around with me so she could cite examples of the hypocrisy, mendacity, and corruptibility of our elected officials when all I can say is, "they're all a bunch of lying thieves." I wish I could carry her around with me because she has such a way with words and because, at the end of it all, she has hope for the future, which is terribly reassuring after she tells us about the present. Molly Ivins is the Susan Lucci of the Pulitzer. Award her already!

Molly Ivins is simply a top-notch columnist who documents her opinions with facts that cannot be denied. So, her detractors resort to calling her "liberal" as though that word has the Magical Power to transform sense and reason and humor and documentation into a negative.

The far right, filled with paranoia and mistrust, needs to resort to name calling when they deal with this witty, tough, and very well-informed treasure. Why? She's got the goods on them. (She has been a thorn in Bush's side relentlessly cutting through his misdirection to reveal what he does. And, oh, how that annoys those who want to revive the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities -- that wonderful little gang that brought blacklisting and mud-slinging to the halls of congress.)

Ivins is a patriotic writer -- too in love with her country and its Constitution to sit by quietly while it gets dismantled in the name of "security" by those who use fear as their political cover, and too sharp to allow the politics of destruction to go unpunished.

Thanks to Molly Ivins, there is something to love about Texas after all!

This collection of Molly Ivins news articles is a god-send for those of us who are not privileged to be able to read her column on a regular basis. This truth-seeker tells it like it is and the reader is left with the feeling that you have just shared an intimate cup of coffee with one of the most astute political observers of our time. My only regret when I closed the book is that my own writing skills are not on a par with this seasoned journalist. I look forward to more and more of her quality analysis and use of the language to demand our attention to the important issues of the day.

Molly Ivins work is a delight and a joy, and this is her at her best. Her optimism, humor, intelligence and willingness to examine real issues make this books a delight. Don't get it if you don't have time to read it; I stayed up to 4 in the morning on a worknight to finish it. She is also hilarious.

In addition to enthralling us with her brilliant and hilarious upbraiding of those pols who do not live up to her standards of honesty and integrity, Ivins also uplifts with stories of those who do. I enjoyed her essays on Bob Bullock and Barbara Jordan so much I read them to friends who feel blue. Be good to yourself; go read them yourself!

Whenever I see a Molly Ivans piece on the op-ed page of my morning paper, a warm feeling of anticipation comes over me. So when I came across this collection of her essays at an airport ``bookstore'' before a long trip home, plunking down the $12 was a no-brainer. I wasn't disappointed.

The pieces in this book are full of Texas charm, humor, and just plain common sense, but also the facts that so often go unreported in today's news. Her topics are many, but three that come up often in this collection are media ethics (got that? media ethics debated by a journalist!), hypocrisy (Al D'Amato conduct an ethics investigation?), and her favorite, the U.S. campaign financing system (which she refers to as ``legalized bribery'') and its fundamental effects on our society. ``The truth is that there is no political story more important than campaign financing. It's not just the hottest political story---it's the only story. It's the key to the real source of class warfare in this country.'' Not only are these issues and many others addressed intelligently with an eye toward ferreting out the truth, but they are often a laugh riot!

The introduction to the book was written in January, 1998, just after the Lewinsky scandal broke, and all but one of the pieces were originally published from 1993 to 1997. Some of the events Ivans refers to are thus a bit dated today (early 1999), but her writing still packs a wallop.

After reading this authors book on George Jr. - Shrub, I was excited to pick this one up. I figured I was going to get non-stop chapters of defense and support of President Clinton. Unfortuantly what I wanted only covered 50% of the book. The other half of the book covered Texas politics and personal columns on people she admired. The book is just a few years of her columns arranged by topic into sections of the book. This did make it easy for me to skip through the areas I was not interested in.

Overall the book was funny and interesting. I found that when she was writing on national political issues, I tended to be with her step for step. She is not a blind supporter of President Clinton, but takes a more practical approach to her politics. She does not just disagree with all things Republican and agree with all things Democratic. I found that I even liked it when she did give Bill some grief about some of his many missteps. So I really enjoyed half of the book, and given the title was surprised that anything-other then national politics was covered. I just was not that interested in reading about a local Texas Senator working on a road project.

It took Ivins some time to get around to writing another book (as she puts it, now she's an "arthur"), and I agree that it was too long. She is funny and sincere at the same time. In thirty years, when we try to explain the 1990s to kids who weren't even born then, this book will shed a lot of light.

A nice thing about this book is that the columns are divvied up in to topical groupings, which makes it better organized and gives it a better flow. Other than that, it is standard Ivins: bitingly humourous political commentary with a Texan flavour. It says a lot for her that she likes her home state very much, and that it seems to mostly like her. It should: she's a credit to it.

Molly Ivins is so dead-on funny that you will find yourself re-reading this book when you need a little chuckle. She takes the potentially deeply depressing subject of "politics" and pokes enough fun at it to keep you reading--and learning about how things really work--all the way through. Once she's opened your eyes, you'll see a lot of things you'd missed before, and you'll be grateful to her for it.

Gotta love a woman with succh brains and wit! Although not quite as funny as previous books, this collections of essays are every bit as vital reading. The second section of essays "We The People" is a hoot, and her tribute to Barbara Jordan is very moving.

THANK YOU MOLLY!