12/31/2005 12:45 AM
Posted by Skwid

America: The Book (A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction) by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

What superlatives are there that have not spent upon Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? Well, OK..."polite" is probably one they don't get too much...yeah, OK, "decorous" too, probably. OK, what superlatives that don't easily translate into a variant of "cool," though? See, not a lot. America: The Book is a dead-tree distillation of The Daily Show's biting satire, smart-assed commentary, and Canadian baiting, and is easily the best book I've ever read almost entirely while seated on my toilet.

Framed in the device (and all the trimmings, in the hardcover version, including an assignment grid inside the front cover) of being a textbook on American History and Government, America: The Book is one good chuckle after another. From the mocha-licious foreward by "Thomas Jefferson" to the acknowledgement to Maya Angelou, you can basically open this book to any given page and be assured you will find amusement, and occasionally hints of insight. If there's one place I can fault this book, it's that the show so often really does inform and can even broaden the mind, while the book gives most of that a miss in favor of being consistently funny. But whether you're a devotee of the Daily Show already, or just wondering what the fuss about "fake news" is all about, pick this book up and give it a couple of pages. I think you'll enjoy yourself.

Lyric: One that thinks I'm right, one knows that I'm wrong