I had high hopes for this book but it failed to deliver. It's largely a polemic anti-conservative rant more than a scholarly deconstruction of conservatism. It's unquestionably one of the worst books I've ever read, lacking in both structure and style. I have no clue how crappy books like this get published other than by catering to the political leanings of the publisher and editor. Truly a waste of good paper.

Well, this book was a real bummer to read. Not because much of it came as a surprise (if you read this book, you're likely to know bits of most things it touches on) but because it portrays a problem so entrenched and so destructive that there seems little hope but surrender. It is well documented and annotated, and boils the strategy down nicely: 1 - Get into a position of power by demonizing everyone else, including the government, 2 - Once in power, stuff the government with your cronies to f...

Being a social liberal, I figured it was high time that I read some unabashedly liberal nonfiction. Thomas Frank's intelligent and well-researched excoriation of neoconservatives presumes to be a sweeping indictment of the greedy, cynical school of thought that has allowed unprecedented gaps between rich and poor, and it is largely successful. Frank's one failure, if you can call it that, is not keeping the tone relatively neutral and allowing the outrageous deeds of the book's antiheroes to spe...

"What makes a place a free-market paradise is not the absence of government; it is the capture of government by business interests."This line by Thomas Frank effectively summarizes his latest missive, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, a scathing indictment of conservative ideology and the modern conservative movement. It is one of the most illuminating political books I've ever read. Frank's research is exhaustive – from conservatism's birth in the cradle of industry to its modern makeo...

I am not saying the information is not true, but if you want a completely one-sided view on why Conservatism is bad, this is the book for you. The author looks at conservatives as always being greedy and selfish and liberals as always being right and pure. If he had critiqued both sides with the same level of scrutiny, I would have a different rating. But the way it was written is nauseating...

I love to read a good horror story in October, and this one made my hair stand on end more than any of the zombie/vampire novels I've read this month.**Shudder.**

Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" I consider to be the preeminent book about what has happened politically in the U.S. the past 35 years. "The Wrecking Crew" is a worthy successor. Full of statements by Far Right conservatives themselves, the book points out the Far Right's efforts to dismantle the federal government by cronyism, massive debt, and purposeful ineptitude. Which is to say, the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina and other federal agencies' failures the past eight years...

In this worthy follow-up to his What's the Matter with Kansas Thomas Frank show how modern conservatives demonstrate their contempt for government per se by systematically eviscerating and/or privatizing it when they are in power and sabotaging is operation when they are not.And what is the result of such conduct? Government becomes even more inept and corrupt, giving the conservatives even clearer reasons to despise it.

Dynamic eye-opener. Conservatives rule by transforming government from problem-solver to self-perpetuating profit center for a nexus of lobbyist/politicians that has no central principle beyond profit-seeking. But you already knew that. It's the way Frank tells the story of the transformation of the College Republicans under Jack Abramoff and their profitable support of apartheid South Africa; the transformation of the D.C. environs into an ultra-rich enclave of political entrepreneurs; the holy...

The audio CD of “The Wrecking Crew” is handled by Oliver Wyman, who after a few hours begins to sound eerily similar to Casey Kasem. I’ve read a couple of books labored over by Thomas Frank (“Commodify Your Dissent” and “One Market Under God”), and find that he is erudite, crisply efficient, and relentlessly adversarial with respect to the fetishization of markets as moral instruments. For those who are familiar with the machinations of self-styled “free market capitalists,” there isn’t a great

This is one of the scariest books I've ever read. That is particularly because it is non-fiction, well researched, and based on interviews with the purveyors of this diabolical plot to take over the country.The guilty are identified, with no particular surprise, as key members of the Republican Party. The guilty individuals themselves readily confess to their manipulations. And what is that? Nothing less than control of the government for their own means. We have been brought up to believe that

The corporate media would have the US citizenry believe Donald Trump and his regime of destruction are an anomaly in the history of our government. Thomas Frank knows otherwise—Trump is merely the perhaps inevitable culmination of decades of conservative politics. That he is also a perfect stalking horse to keep the public distracted while the neoliberals in both parties gut the republic is serendipity at its finest."Believing effective government to be somewhere between impossible and undesirab...

THE ENEMY WITHIN This book is a historically informed, fantastically well written look at the U.S. political system with particular emphasis on the Conservative Republicans who have dominated it for so long.Franks, who has obviously put a lot of effort into researching this book, digs deep into the activities and thinking of right wing conservatism which has given the U.S. such nefarious characters as Ollie North, Ronald Regan, Tom De Lay and the recently departed (well just the Oval office, but...

I have such a complicated relationship with Thomas Frank (the work, not the man, who I've met a few times and who was remarkably nice when I yelled at him about giving up his job at the Wall Street Journal). I like much of his writing and define myself deeply against much of it as well. I had not read this at the time it was written (I also read What's The Matter With Kansas late, though because I take the unfashionable position that abortion and gay rights ARE economic issues I probably would h...

An entertaining history of how the right has been crippling our government in order to gain power and enrich itself and its corporate clients from the time of Richard Nixon, through their most productive years under Reagan and a pair of Bushes and no slack for Clinton. We are now reaping some more of the some the "benefits" of over thirty years of turning capable people out of government service and putting in appointed hacks who see business not the people as their client to enable the grand ri...

Received this book as a gift (thanks Terry!) and kind of sat on it for a while, I think I was in willful denial actually, trying to not look into this abyss that is modern American government under siege. Of course, this is somehow fitting given that the thrust of the book is an examination of how the conservative movement works both for and with (see "revolving door") industry and lobbyists to make government fail so badly no one minds/notices when it's gone; thereby letting the "free market" a...

Good overview and history of the greed and paranoid anti-government ideology of conservatives deliberately wrecking government from within dating from Reagan to Bush Jnr's trillion-dollar Iraq War II. In the middle the use of Dubya for George W Bush, was a bit annoying and detracted from the more serious and proper tone in the rest of the book.Focuses on Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff from the 1980s as College Republicans to lobbying for big business. A revealing insight into how these rope s...

This is the most disturbing book I read in 2008. It chronicles how the conservative Republicans set out to destroy the government. This sounds too crazy to believe, but this is a story I've read of elsewhere (ie. see The Right Nation by the man who writes Lexington for the Economist, for instance). Mr. Frank actually quotes from Grover Norquist's speeches and writings where he, along with many others, sets out the plan. The idea was to privatize where possible (Blackwater and FEMA) to cripple th...

Thomas Frank is probably well known in certain reading circles. Among other publications he writes for The Wall Street Journal, and this and his other books, probably the most known: What's the Matter with Kansas, puts him squarely on the moderate side of conservative or perhaps the right-wing side of liberal. This is precisely what the Wrecking crew tries to point out: that these sides are no longer valid. What Americans must realize is that the Republicans since the mid-sixties have realized t...

Thomas Frank--you are the fustigator we need right now. I'm still on board with Stiglitz, but Frank is endowed with a much more gimlet eye and sharper tongue. And it's delightful to find someone whose playfulness of diction matches his playfulness with the subject matter (some great vocabulary here, though perhaps an over-reliance on the word "boodler" and really no need to use the word enragée more than once). The main thesis of this book, as I take it, is to point out how well made the GOP has...