Phillip Hines

The standard disclaimer applies: I received this book free as a promotion from GoodReads so I didn't pay a thing for it. Despite this generous display of largess my typical honest review follows. Further, it is generally difficult when reading a book with a political bent to separate the book and its execution from the content. If the book shares ideas that you agree with then you are automatically more prone to think highly of it. This is an unavoidable reality of humanity that I will attempt to escape the influence of. It's also difficult to be objective because the return address on the envelope in which I received this book had the author's name and address. So clearly this isn't some huge mega-corporation sending me a book but instead some real person who put forth effort to write it.

Sadly, despite all the disclaimers and influences above I was exceptionally disappointed in this offering. It is what it says it is and no more: a collection of Romney quotes. The quotes focus almost exclusively on the last six years which makes them fundamentally all from the context of a campaign whose obvious goal is to appeal to the largest number of potential voters. There's little of the real man here but rather standard political demagoguery. I didn't really learn anything about Romney in this book. I learned that the standard Republican platform was phrased in Romney's words. That's not especially helpful.

Structurally the book is haphazard. The author has gone to great pains to break the quotes up into very granular categories but there is much overlap and some categories are trivially short. It's almost as if the author broke down his content into more categories just to make the book seem more substantial since a new category with only one entry allows him to leave three quarters of a page blank.

Most disappointing was the fact that the author didn't really write anything. There is a brief introduction which I assume to be a product of the author but the bulk of the book is just very loosely categorized quotations, taken from public records and given verbatim without any commentary or editorial oversight whatsoever. I could have written a very simple computer program to do the same job just by looking at key words and putting things into buckets to be printed out by the publisher. That's not writing; it's just sorting.

So to sum up, this book paints a poor and limited picture of Mitt Romney as a person. As a work of reference it is poorly and insufficiently organized but perhaps sufficient to serve the needs of some author of the future who will write a real book about the man who may or may not become our next president.… (mehr)