Paperback Storm

While at my local book emporium the other day, hunting for a couple good ones to get me through today’s anticipated fourth BIG nor'easter, I happened on some seriously egregious, guffaw-worthy-if-they-weren't-so-horrifying, 1984-ish examples of solidly on-the-grift predatory editors going for the easy marks.

There’s Understanding Trump by that rancidly corpulent fraudster, Newt Contract-ON-America Gingrich.
Jake Nevins at The Guardian had the stomach to read and review this fetid fairy tale. After relaying one of Newty's many fraud riddled, bullshit blatherings on how Trump is an everyman, Nevins notes:

The book, in total, is filled with Gingrichian platitudes...They don’t exactly help us “understand Trump,” though they do offer a look into the rhetorical acrobatics one might employ to defend the indefensible.

Lawrence Downes gets right to the point, no words minced, in his L.A. Times review of The Faith of Donald Trump. The piece is, molto appropriately titled Holy crap: the godly side of Donald Trump.

This week I went on a strange trip, a pilgrimage to a place where common words and assumptions were flipped upside down and backward, where my vision blurred and I felt an unseen force trying to make my brain go stupid.

I read "The Faith of Donald J. Trump," just published. Its subtitle: "A Spiritual Biography.”

His fabulously trenchant fire burns throughout.

...read the foreword, by Eric Metaxas. He says "many serious Christians" embrace this president because they understand God's grace better than others. He says moralizing naysayers are like "the elder brother in the parable of the Good Samaritan."

But wait, you say: There is no elder brother in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Maybe he meant the Prodigal Son.

The post's a real honey – go read the whole (brief) thing.

And then, of course, I came upon the remaindered Easy Guide to the Bible. Gosh, do I smell a bit of Franklin Graham/Paula White brimstone-flavored chicanery in the air?

The title and cover art instantly conveyed to me that this was a Jesus for Dummies and Short Attention Span Republicans pile ‘o’ crap so I didn’t look more closely. I tried to find it online but it’s nowhere. Did the famed right-wing crackpots publisher, Regnery, poop this pile out? Simon and Schuster? Mebbe. Dunno.

And the Encyclopedia Britannica puts out the 10-Minute Guide: Bible. No, I didn’t give that one a deep perusal either.

Should the Old and New Testaments be easily consumable in Twitter length bites? This is a tome which so many people on this sad, benighted planet rely on for life instruction and/or justification of their crimes against humanity and Mother Nature. Seems to me, readers/followers are short-sheeting themselves, their faith, their god and the planet.

But HEY, waduiknow – I'm just a live-and-let-live, I-can-wait-'til-the-end-to-find-out Agnostic.

What books did I bring home? Donna Leon's Earthly Remains and Chuck Wendig's Unclean Spirits. I'm all set for the storm, whether it shows its face or not.