Yes, Book Corner was on a little bit of a hiatus, as I undertook a little reading side project. Kindle lets you sample books for free. I decided to sample the/a book of each of the (then) TWENTY Democratic presidential candidates, in alphabetical order; and see if there were any that I felt I could stomach reading in their entirety. Surprisingly, there were quite a few. But I’m a pushover for memoir.
Note that the length of samples on Kindle varies wildly. Sometimes I would barely get through an introduction before they’d cut me off. Other times I wondered if I had accidentally bought the whole book.
Here are my extremely brief opinions based on mostly extremely brief samples.
Bennet – (I know, Who?) – Seems to have an interesting background with a mix of business & government experience.
Biden – idyllic 1950s Catholic childhood.
Booker – emphasis on how he “stands on the shoulders of giants”.
Buttigieg – Very interesting introduction, not about him, but about his Midwestern ex-factory town having gone bust. This one is in my top 5 to read entirely.
Castro – Beginning is all about his Mexican immigrant orphaned grandmother’s childhood migration experience. Wait a minute, I might have mixed this one up with Herbert.
DeBlasio – no book.
Delaney – Proud to have been voted Congress’ third-most bipartisan member! Yay! I’m all about the aisle-reaching.
Gabbard – Has a book… but no sample, for some reason. It is possible the book is too short for a sample to be monetarily feasible for Amazon.
Gillibrand – Big on the feminist woman stuff.
Harris – All about her superstar independent Indian mom.
Hickenlooper – Surprisngly dull, considering he has a background in running brewpubs. Writing style is very digressive, and the story contains lots of relationship crap about his marital troubles.
Herbert – (I know, Who?) – See Castro
Inslee – A TOTALLY different book from the others, about climate change.
Klobuchar – Midwestern Swiss grandparents.
Ryan – Mindfulness. Ugh.
Sanders – Surprisingly one of the most interesting ones, considering I have no time for his one-note socialism But he’s got that New Yorker-turned-Vermonter thing going on, so as a memoir, I’m into it.
Warren – Wow. I’ll come back to this one.
Williamson – Louise Hay 2020!!!
Yang – Off topic. WAY off topic.
And I’m leaving one out. I forget who, someone else besides De Blasio who didn’t have a book. Oh – must have been Swalwell. Who’s out, anyway.
The one book I am definitely going back to is Elizabeth Warren’s. This one’s a game changer. I had not much interest in her before, as a candidate – I respected her Trump barbs and courage and outspokenness in Congress, but policy-wise, she just seemed like Sanders Lite. Well, I’m hooked now. I’ve left Team Biden – he is just going to majorly screw up somewhere along the way and lose the election, is my fear… I’m Team Warren now. She makes me feel how lucky I am to have been born when and where I was, a time and place (and genetics and parents) that enabled me to launch myself into the middle class and beyond quite easily. Now I see how the young and even not-so-young people of today don’t have it that easy. I used to think it was all a big sob story…. but kind of like when I read Grapes of Wrath, this book is making me actually see the error or my ways. Not many books do that.
