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Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Posted by Mark | Filed under Books

I fin­ished read­ing Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Bal­anced Look at the Right. the other night. I’ve been a bit busy, hence the delay in writ­ing up my lit­tle review of the book.

First, there’s a cou­ple of things that you should keep in mind about my opin­ion on this book:

• My gen­eral read­ing inter­ests keep me firmly planted in the fic­tion sec­tion, so this was quite unlike any­thing I’ve read
• Prior to read­ing this book, I have had lit­tle to no direct expo­sure to Franken’s work.
• I didn’t vote for Bush.
• I don’t like the way the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has been han­dling things since they came into power.
• I am not a lawyer or an elec­tion offi­cial but I still think the 2000 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion had some fishy things going on in it (par­tic­u­larly in Flordia).

Now that I’ve got those dis­claimers out of the way, I can tell you that I greatly enjoyed this book and will defi­nately be look­ing at bor­row­ing the rest of Franken’s books (from friends or my local library). Franken’s sense of humor and sharp sar­casm really struck a chord with me. That I agreed with a lot of his points through­out the book, didn’t hurt either. One of the things that I really liked about the book was how well Franken (and his team of Havard stu­dents) doc­u­mented all the quotes that Franken used, via foot­notes at the bot­tom of the pages and in the bib­li­og­ra­phy at the end of the book. It really gave the book a feeel­ing of pro­fes­sion­al­ism that frankly, I wasn’t expect­ing. From what I’d heard about the book via the media; I was expect­ing it to be more along the lines of drink­ing burnt cof­fee made with reused grinds rather than the smooth latte that it went down as. How­ever, that is not to say that the book is with­out it’s faults.

When you turn the page to a new chap­ter, you can expect it to have lit­tle or no con­nec­tion to the pre­vi­ous chap­ter; this makes for a very rough tran­si­tion between chap­ters and reduces the read­i­bil­ity of the book. Also, at points Franken low­ers him­self to the level of the peo­ple he’s com­plain­ing about in the book (the Right) by resort­ing to child­ish name­call­ing. Gen­er­ally, he does it after he’s just fin­ished quot­ing some­body from the the Right do it and walked you through sev­eral para­graphs to show how wrong that per­son from the Right was. Some­times it’s even funny when he does it; how­ever over­all, it’s not a tech­nique that works for me. I’d rather have seen him stay above that sort of thing and instead just con­tinue to use things that the Right have said to show their incon­sis­ten­cies and stupidities.

Well, that’s all for now (my break’s over and I need to get back to work). I’ll be read­ing Eliz­a­beth Peter’s The Fal­con at the Por­tal next.

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