Newt Gingrich's Amazon book reviews.

June 7, 2005 10:55 AM

Newt Gingrich's Amazon book reviews."Speaker Gingrich is an avid reader. He does not review all of the books he reads. You will not find any bad reviews here, just the books he thinks you might enjoy."
posted by Prospero (14 comments total)

Saw this a while ago. I thought it was interesting that several of the books Newt enjoyed were on evolutionary biology. Which both raised and lowered my opinion of him.
posted by iron chef morimoto at 11:38 AM on June 7, 2005

Wow. I find it very interesting (telling?) that one of his shared purchases was Kaplan's Warrior Politics.

Kaplan calls for a reestablishment of American (primarily) realpolitik, one distanced from Judeo-Christian (or private) virtue and closer to a "pagan" (public) one. - from the Amazon review

I think Newt is on to something here... Can he still rally the small government Republicans?
posted by rush at 11:42 AM on June 7, 2005

Here's some interesting background.
posted by rush at 12:09 PM on June 7, 2005

Can he still rally the small government Republicans?

I sincerely doubt it.
posted by Kwantsar at 12:10 PM on June 7, 2005

Newt always struck me as particularly intelectual for a republican. Certanly more so then the hacks in charge of domestic policy these days.
posted by delmoi at 12:42 PM on June 7, 2005

I've always believed that the smarter you are the more capable of evil you are.
posted by Item at 1:26 PM on June 7, 2005

I've always believed that the smarter you are the more capable of evil you are.

e.g. Henry Kissinger.
posted by Ryvar at 1:29 PM on June 7, 2005

Yeah, that was kinda what I was getting at above. Newt's obviously a really smart guy, who gained power by playing to a demographic that doesn't necessarily think of "smart" as a positive attribute.
posted by iron chef morimoto at 1:39 PM on June 7, 2005

We can wax lyrical about the demonic genius based upon his book choice in geopolitics, philosophy, etc. but the fact is that some of those books looked plain fucking rubbish. "Path of the Assassin" FFS! I looked through the first couple of pages and saw as much shite in his listing as anything else worthwhile.

Does he get paid any moolah by Amazon for writing these? Or a wodge from the companies who publish them? You know how much these politicos get lobbied.
posted by ClanvidHorse at 2:39 PM on June 7, 2005

What I found most interesting about the list is what might be its carefully constructed appearance of egalitarianism, or perhaps even the real thing. Granted that there isn't anything on the order of Ulysses or Foucault's Pendulum on the list, but he seems to pay the same attention to books on the Iraq war and evolutionary biology as he does to Robert Parker novels. And I can't think of any other politicians who have openly admitted to reading Clive Cussler.
posted by Prospero at 3:14 PM on June 7, 2005

is there a way to find out if this is really him?
posted by maulik at 3:21 PM on June 7, 2005

maulik:

This has been around for years (he was one of Amazon's top 100 reviewers for awhile), and it's never been disputed. Barring alien clones and the illuminati, I think it's safe to say it's him.
posted by iron chef morimoto at 4:43 PM on June 7, 2005

Newt's obviously a really smart guy

No. He's smart enough to appropriate the language of whatever discipline he's bloviating on about at any particular moment, but that's it.

In the early '90s, he issued a cheat-sheet of the alarmingly powerful vocabulary still in use: label any Democratic position, on taxation or sewerage rates or anything at all, as "depraved," "sick," "unpatriotic," et al., ad nauseaum. When the Class of '94 took hold, Gingrich acquired a reputation as a solon and a deep thinker. Various publications encouraged him to opine freely about all sorts of things he knew fuck-all about, including the fact that men were, via evolution, hardier than women due to the necessity to chase down giraffes, while the gals were unfit for combat due to their "monthly infections."

(I leave it to readers who have seen a photograph of Mr. Gingrich to contemplate him successfully chasing down a giraffe or any quadriped more threatening than a dessert cart.)
posted by vetiver at 8:54 PM on June 7, 2005

The newtster was on the Daily Show last night, and jon was trying to get him to say he was going to run for prez.
posted by delmoi at 9:45 AM on June 8, 2005