Mona Charen has a loyal following from her syndicated newspaper column (which runs in more than two hundred newspapers) and her many television and radio appearances. Her first book, Useful Idiots, was a six-week New York Times bestseller. Now she's back, switching her focus from foreign policy to domestic issues.
Unlike some conservatives who throw verbal hand-grenades, Charen never gets shrill or mean. Instead, she focuses on the facts to reveal exactly why liberals are wrong - and how their proposals hurt the very people they claim to be fighting for, as well as the country as a whole.
Do-Gooders is a guide to the smug know-it-alls in politics, the news media, and Hollywood who think they know what's best for the poor and other needy Americans. From Marion Wright Edelman to Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton to Rob Reiner, this book will skewer the liberals by name. It covers topics like:
· Education: Do-gooders send their own kids to private schools while working to deny poor children a better education through voucher programs.
· Affirmative Action: Do-gooders defend racial preferences at all costs, while ignoring the enormous problems they create for African Americans at all levels of achievement.
· Welfare: Do-gooders thought welfare reform in the 1990s would hurt the poor, and they still refuse to admit how much it actually helped.
By collecting and exposing the most outrageous quotes and actions of the do-gooders, this book will become a must-read for conservatives across the country as they gear up for the next round of policy battles.
The smoothness and impartiality of Sandra Burr's narration are remarkable achievements, considering the author's searing arguments and her sensational examples of liberalism's ideological excesses. As in all polemics, the audio is full of dramatic and overgeneralized conclusions that rest on worldviews and assumptions not explained. Over the course of the nine hours, however, one slowly does gather up the assumptions that permeate the thinking of this and other conservative writers--a reliance on Old Testament justice, oversimplified accountability, and nostalgia for a less complicated moral climate. This is one of the more effective attempts to disguise the righteous indignation that is ever present on both sides of the Left-Right debate. T.W. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
Mona Charen, one of the most prominent conservative writers in the country, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Useful Idiots. She writes a critically acclaimed syndicated column that appears in more than 200 newspapers, and is a former writer for National Review. She appears regularly on radio and television news shows and is a former panelist of CNN's Capital Gang. She lives with her family outside of Washington, DC.
