Rating: Summary: Move over Seinfeld, Liddy's here!!! Review: Ha ha ha! When I was a kid, American criminals weren't this funny! America less free? I don't have *any* idea what Liddy's talking about - in which other country on God's green earth could a lying, criminal, racist chauvinist actually be hailed as a hero?! Or is that a symptom of our godless, "liberal-poisoned" times? I'd like to see one person on this list who's given this book a positive review, who isn't white. Just one - come on! When Liddy was growing up, anyone who wasn't white said "Yessuh, ah'll jes sit at the back hyar" and anyone who was female wore cute dresses and baked pies, while the man of the house basked in the certain knowledge that he was the center of the universe. Hunter S. Thompson said of Liddy's boss, Tricky Dicky Nixon, when he died, that Tricky was so crooked, he needed his valets to screw him into his pants every morning. Here's one of his valets, telling us that America was a greater, nobler nation when everyone was mean-spirited, racist and chauvinist - and oh yes, you had the freedom to die in your car if you wanted, to be lynched by a mob if you wanted, to eat pesticide laden-fruit if you wanted and to be confined to the kitchen as a baby-making machine if you wanted! Dang! We must be less free!! Can I go back and change my rating?!
Rating: Summary: Interesting but narrow view of America Review: Liddy wants his readers to believe America was a better place when blacks had no rights, women were subservient to men and people could wear guns, just like they wore hats. Liddy is a right-wing extremist whose views will delight those who agree, and appall those who disagree.
Rating: Summary: When I Was a Kid This Was a Free Country,By G. Gordon Liddy Review: After reading his comments on political correctness in America today it made me more aware of our current socities decline due to this wave of correctness. Liddy hits the perverbial nail right on the head in this latest book. I was intrigued by the additional information, and theories put forth in this recent publication concerning the "Watergate" break in. I would highly recommend reading this book for an evening of enlightenment.
Rating: Summary: A man among men Review: I have heard Liddy on his radio show a few times, I considered myself a fan. This book has upgraded my opinion of him to the point that I consider him a true American hero...standing up for common sense and American values with the kind of stubborn indignation that has made him a true leader. If you read this book, you will enjoy it thoroughly, even if you don't share his thoughts on education, the military, and the environment. Liddy is an dynamic and fascinating self made man.
Rating: Summary: Double-barreled Liddy Review: This is a straight-forward, shoot to kill, double-barreled dose of the G-Man. Even the Washington Post gave him a decent review.
Rating: Summary: Well it sure ain't now Review: This book is an eye-opener to say the least. This book is great. The author is a concise and entertaining writer and the information couldn't be more timely. I am an old-fashioned reader. I want to 'know' something. This book is in-depth and full of history. The evidence of our history begs to be recognized. We can fix what we've created but in order to do so we'll need strong people with strong opinions. Gordon Liddy is one of the hero's of our century. It is due to men like this that we still enjoy what few freedom's we have left. Thank you, Mr. Liddy.
Rating: Summary: Insightful, Blunt and Right on the Mark Review: This is a worthwhile read regardless of your political views. While I didn't agree with 100% of what he wrote, I did find myself empathizing with the majority of his 'complaints' about our society. Liddy's style and humor make the book very readable -- I read my copy in two days.Highly recommended.
Rating: Summary: Sad Review: "Most societies have some version of the Golden Age myth. (The term itself comes from the ancient Greek poet and moral philosopher Hesiod...) Once, it is said, there was a time when disorder and sin were nonexistent...children respected their elders; husbands and wives were faithful to each other...popular literature was highly intellecual, and tended to promote good character... "...in recent years the intellectuals and publicists of the American Right, drawing on both Jefferson-Jackson populism and Marxism, have developed a unique synthesis of the Golden Age and devil myths. The Golden Age...ended in the 1960's, when long-haired campus radicals took over the culture..." Michael Lind UP FROM CONSERVATISM "The Culture War and the Myth of the New Class" "Let me control the myths of a nation and I care not who makes its laws." Mark Twain "All is vanity." Shakespeare Fans of G. Gordon Liddy who find both his prose and history in American society something to be proud of will I'm sure enjoy this book, WHEN I WAS A KID... as much as those with an actual sense of history will find it uniquely mythological to say the least. The one thing that keeps coming to mind, however, in all his referencing of a world that was really so much less free for even a significant portion of white men than he would like to admit compared to today (let alone everyone else) is, ironically, Picasso. Picasso, after all his travels, after all his many women, after becoming a child prodigy and then an art superstar and then one of the most powerful cultural forces of the 20th century, was photographed and interviewed often as frightened and angry in the final years of his life in the early 1970's. This was a couple of years before the Watergate Scandal, where Richard Nixon came closer to destroying American democracy than most people would like to admit today. Picasso looked that way because for a moment in time he somehow became old; not in the way that leads to beauty through wisdom, but the frightened and angry curmudgeon old that seems like a giant defense mechanism for an ancient broken heart. Regardless of how great and important his life was and how much of a contribution he became to look back on, Picasso's immense ego, still, simply, didn't want to die. Liddy's WHEN I WAS A KID seems to be so saturated with this primal fear of the self-absorbed--the legitimate fear that physical death is the end of everything and one's popular view of the self is going to die right along with the physical body--that I can't imagine it being anything but a sad book for even his fans soon after they put it down, regardless of how it makes them feel beforehand. Arguing the validity of his view of American culture and history as upheld in WHEN I WAS A KID in that context is pointless. Sadness and melancholy, the likes of which has little to nothing to do with the "politically correct" state of the USA, permeates this book with every attempt to reenergize an impotent myth of America's past that Globalization and the Information Society is killing a lot faster than the Civil Rights Movement, the Equal Rights Amendment or the fall of the Berlin wall had ever planned on. I listen to the voice of G. Gordon Liddy occasionally on talk radio. (A friend of mine, a victim of child abuse, likes anything on talk radio that sounds threateningly authoritarian or anxiety-ladenly patriotic.) And I don't hear testosterone or conservatism or even Viagra... I hear a man fighting against coming to terms with the arc of human life. The deeply ambivalent, angry, and righteous triumphalism with which he feels so pressing a need to saturate his neo-Twainish world view with ironically becomes little more than a reminder of two facets of life that, as we must all some day face in our own way privately, would be painful for anyone to come to terms with publicly. The first is that history, not his politics or his fans or today's marketplace, will be in charge of who writes his epitaph. And two, with the writing of that epitaph, much of the funny ideas he holds dear about himself, projected on to the country he writes about, will dissipate like a puff of cigarette smoke over the Rockies. I do not agree with his politics, etc., but unlike a lot of mutually ridiculous conseravtive and liberal political mythology, WHEN I WAS A KID, a sort of TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE from the Dark Side, makes me too sad to get fired up about it.
Rating: Summary: More Regnery tripe... Review: ...from another radical-right Republican felon.
Rating: Summary: tells it like he sees it Review: Here's plain talk from a straight shooter.
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