Culture Warrior by Bill O'Reilly Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.47 You Save: $10.52 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Culture Warrior
Book Review: Bill Oreilly
Summary: 5 Stars
O'reily has loads of common sense in a world gone crazy..Never politically correct,just calls it as he sees it..Typical New Yorker..Love it
Lookout Leftys,rightys and mids..If Your off hes going to tag you
Book Review: Book
Summary: 5 Stars
Shipped and received right on time. In perfect condition. With this author you will always get the truth with no bull added. Would surely purchase from seller againBook Review: Charge!
Summary: 4 Stars
Bill polarizes. So anyone who reads this book already has an opinion about the generalities, just not the details of the book. I will review the latter.
More than anything else, this book is a trumpet sounding "reveille," and then "charge!" O'Reilly focuses on tactical issues, as opposed to Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, which is a strategic book, or Ravi Zacharias's Deliver Us From Evil, which is a moral and religious book. All three should be read as a serendipitous trilogy.
As with most of O'Reilly's books, it is a mixture of journalism and journaling. We get the specifics of his battles, the wounds and scars he has suffered in standing for traditionalism. So it is slight on theory, except for the last chapter.
This book has great photos: Calvin Coolidge's Christmas greeting, George Clooney's face frozen mid-shout. My favorites are the archival photos of O'Reilly with vintage 1970s hair. Nixon was right when he said burn the tapes!
I do have a question of nomenclature. The opposite of a Secular-Progressive is not a Traditionalist, but a Spiritual-Traditionalist. O'Reilly makes the case for an atheistic-agnostic dynamic among the traditionalists, but can you show me a traditionalist society that was secular?
One scholar noted, "When the history of human thought shall be written from the point of view of temple worship, it may well be found that temples and the work done in them have been the dominating influence in shaping human thought from the beginning of the race."
Furthermore, there is no hope in secularism. Or more pointedly, there is no progress in Progressivism. Peter Kreeft observed that modernists (roughly equivalent to the S-P) put their faith in the one thing that cannot progress: matter (C.S. Lewis for the Third Millennium : Six Essays on the Abolition of Man).
Think about it--S-P reduces everything to matter, which is locked in the prison cell of thermodynamics and entropy. Secular-Progressivism is really Self-Contradictoryism.
Two end points. His fictions President Hernandez in 2020 is really Obama, just 10 years earlier. This is a benchmark as to the rate of change in the culture war--things are rushing quicker than anticipated.
His last chapter on the code of the traditional warrior should be photocopied and memorized. Hopefully some anthology a century from now will include it for required reading in history classes when this era is finally studied impartially.
Book Review: Cliched Propoganda will drive reasonable folks away... (O'Reilly, p.198). Ironic?
Summary: 2 Stars
The aforementioned quote speaks for itself, and is perhaps the most ironic sentence in Bill O'Reilly's new work--Culture Warrior. I received this as a "Happy Holidays" gift (sorry, but I can't say the C word due to my SP Corps loyalty...). *COUGH*
Anyway, this was a gag gift from a close friend of mine, as she knows that I often watch O'Reilly and other talking heads for the sheer entertainment value and such. Unlike some of the more negative reviews here, I will say that O'Reilly, like Hannity, Limbaugh, and Franken have a great deal of talent in that they can hold long diatribes about the most mundane of subjects and make them come across as appealing to a diverse audience. O'Reilly does not disappoint readers in this regard.
With that being said, the main problem I have with Culture Warrior is that O'Reilly writes like he talks-in short talking points and with a harsh tone. This is not to say that this is a bad thing, but it can grow annoying at times, particularly since even though O'Reilly has several advanced degrees, he writes like a first year undergraduate.
O'Reilly starts off by claiming that the contemporary culture war in this country cannot be framed in terms of liberals and conservatives. He then proceeds to claim that there are many shade of gray, and that boiling down such a complex issue into two sides is essentially a misguided approach to understanding the underlying issues at stake here.
However, O'Reilly immediately begins to frame this 'battle' in terms of secular-progressives (or SP's, O'Reilly abbreviates them since he uses the term probably more than 100 times in this book) versus traditionalists. In other words, he apparently he has done the very thing that he claimed he wouldn't do in this book which is essentially to frame this issue in terms of mutually exclusive aims, goals, and categories. Rather than use liberal v. conservative, O'Reilly substitutes these categories with SP and traditionalists, respectively, despite his claims to the contrary. By the end of the book, he flatly states that one side is just and the other is not, which is quite bizarre. O'Reilly's success with this book and with his show is due to his mastery of the cardinal rule of politics... you have to pander to all sides, even while twisting the knife into the back of the side you wish to defeat. In more pragmatic terms, the use of smoke-screens to cloud your ambitions and allegiances is always the safe and most successful route to traverse.
Despite O'Reilly having earned two master's degrees from prestigious universities, he must have skipped out during his statistics and research methods courses, as his use of anecdotal evidence is appalling and dishonest. Refraining from footnotes or any type of citation format, O'Reilly attempts to portray isolated events as epidemics and anecdotal stories as the universal truth. The most disturbing thing of all is that O'Reilly understands the power he wields, and abuses it to further his sales and unclear and somewhat contradictory agenda.
Yes, it's an enjoyable read, but O'Reilly is quite devious and makes use ad-hominem attacks more often than not, often against the usual suspects, (i.e. the ACLU, Howard Dean, Vermont judges, socialists, etc.). Seriously, smear merchant this, smear merchant that--it gets old after the first few chapters. Truly, the genius is O'Reilly is that he is a captivating media figure, often distorting politics and social issues through his manipulative posturing on countless issues. The same can be said of this book.
Book Review: Cultural Warrior-Bill O'Reilly
Summary: 4 Stars
I found the book interesting. If you are a progressive and to an extend a liberal you will not like this book. But on the other hand, if the shoe fits?? Though a conservative view of various people, media and the like, it does open your mind to people behind the scene who are progressive and liberal in ideas and their methods that forget human nature.If progressive and liberals express their ideals and have failed miserably in past decades. I cannot see how they can say that traditions and conservated methods/government does not work.
Our founding father had it right. Having traditions and being conservative will work with our constitution. Marxism,socialism and communism will bring out the worse in our fellow Americans including leaders. The government does what WE the people want. Read this book, I grew up in the sixty's, in California and my family were at the lower end of the middle class near poverty level. But one thing I learned from my parents was hard work will give the things you want. I do not want any hand out from state or US government because their is tendency that it breeds laziness and thinking that somebody or society owes you some value. This is what this book has shown me no one owes you something.