If you have asked your self this question, you'd better grab this book now. It's not just a Monday morning quarterback commentary, it's an incredibly accurate, concise, and lucid explanation of just what has been going on, how, and why it happened. It's a fast read and in a sense humbling, as we can see what part we have played in getting into this fix. One point that the author makes really sticks in my mind, and has totally changed the lenses in my glasses. Initially I was taken aback, and fel...

Good Stories vs. Bad StoriesThe subtitle of Steve Almond’s book, “What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country,” is not a question, but a declaration. And the happening he has in mind is the presidential election of 2016. On the other hand, however, Almond explains that “what just happened” didn’t just happen. It was years in the making.So, what about the main title? What do “bad stories” have to do with “what the hell just happened to our country?” To answer that question, according to Almond, on...

Yes, yes, yes. Of course, I’m already in the choir, but Almond here offers a deft cogent piece on whuh happened, why, and how we should think about how to proceed.

Ok why am I not hearing more about this fantastic book? Almond puts together the things we're already thinking in such an eloquent and cohesive way, and takes what we're already thinking and then elaborates on it more and brings it to the next level. A- freaking- plus.

This. This is the election reaction I've been waiting for. As I cracked open the book my mind provided a soundtrack--Bonnie Tyler's "I Need a Hero"--and I was off. This isn't the work of a pundit rehashing results and studies. This is the journey of a thinker searching out the advice of other thinkers in an attempt to understand not how Trump got elected but how so many Americans were blind to the truth of the events as they unfolded--from conservatives blind to how staggeringly bad it was for t...

This is how America feels to me these days: a beautiful song drowned out by shouting.There's really nothing new here. I read these theories during the year and a half I spent perusing articles on liberal websites (yep - I'm guilty of confirmation bias) during the 2016 campaigns. Almond leaves nothing out in his examination of what went wrong. He discusses the internet's role in disseminating lies, the origins and faults of the Electoral College, and decries the fact that we still hold our electi...

Well-written. I appreciated the allusions to literature. Definitely told through a white lens, though. I don’t think many people from marginalized backgrounds would express astonishment that discrimination and prejudice are fueled by social, not economic factors.

In Bad Stories Steve Almond takes an even-handed and well considered approach to trying to understand what caused the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. We live and learn through stories, narrative is how we make sense of the world. Even facts that come to us as isolated and without any apparent narrative surrounding them become part of our knowledge when we work them into our existing narrative, perhaps changing it a bit, perhaps supporting it. So when Almond chose to look at the electi...

BAD STORIES is an excellent title, in Steve Almond's usual gifted way, ofor sorting out the nut of the matter. "Bad Stories" is a better way of saying "Fake News" or misinformation, that implies an almost mythological origin to the stories we allow ourselves to believe, with little or no research or factual support. This occurs on all sides of the political aisle, is exacerbated by the lack of respect or resources given to modern journalists, by both audience and employers. And ultimately to the...

4.5 stars -- I won this book as a Goodreads Giveaway. BAD STORIES is about our current political situation. It’s a small book, but it packs in a lot of information and I read it slowly, taking time to stop and think about what I’d just read. Author Steve Almond invites readers to take a step back from the social media-driven fray and cast a serious look around ourselves, asking us to think about if we like what we’ve become and where we’re headed. Almond uses numerous examples from history and l...

|This book was won from a Goodreads giveaway|I was actually very pleasantly surprised by this one. I didn't think I would enjoy it; I thought it'd be a three star at best. I thought it would be an ultra-liberal-can-do-no-wrong kind of book. Don't get me wrong--on the political spectrum, I tend to lean more liberal than conservative, but no group of people is perfect.This book was relatively balanced. Of course, it was anti-current-administration (which I agreed with), but it didn't purport the "...

This book is staggeringly good. I was familiar with Steve Almond from his short stories, but this is straight journalism at its best (which he teaches at Harvard). (It is clear from Almond’s thought processes and messages to students, presented in this volume, that he is a great teacher and seasoned journalist.)In reviewing, there is a tendency to break down books about politics into bullet-point messages, and I hesitate to do that because it would misrepresent Bad Stories as something much smal...

Because I’ve been keeping up with the news over the past couple of years, I was as aware as anyone “what the hell just happened to our country.” But this book was particularly recommended by a GR friend and I was curious what Almond knew that I didn’t. I couldn’t bear to start at the beginning of the already much too-long and painful story so I opened randomly, and think I hit the best essay in the bunch, about the work of Neil Postman, particularly Amusing Ourselves to Death published in 1985,

I should like this. This should fill my mind with blissful confirmation bias. And he has dozens of cool insights and historical trivia to back up many of those insights. Even though there is some structure, chapter headings to come, by the time I was finished I had trouble remembering much of anything. Which obviously could be on me, but the whole book seems kind of rambling. To my view he uses the chapters as a starting point for some sort of literary jam session. So it is more of a spontaneous...

Drawing on history, literature, and criticism, Steve Almond of Dear Sugars parses the bad stories that led to the ultimate bad outcome in November of 2016. This book gave me a much greater understanding of the cultural forces that led to the election of Donald Trump, and I feel more informed and empowered because of it. A quick, accessible read that I’ll be thinking about and recommending for a long time to come.

Not perfect -- other reviewers are right in saying that Almond's digressions about his novels are needlessly distracting and don't add anything to his argument -- but damned good. I folded down a lot of page corners with the thought of quoting from the book here, but in the end there were just too many folded corners. Almond is rightly angry and alarmed about how debased our political culture has become, and his book is a series of searing indictments of Politics as entertainment (Almond quotes

Although it sounds like fiction (and I wish it was), Steve Almond's Bad Stories is actually nonfiction. For himself, for his journalism students, and for other befuddled voters, Almond analyzes what went wrong in the last presidential election. Almond examines history, popular culture and literature as he searches for answers in Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country.Almond uses literature and journalists of the past to say we were warned. Hunter S. Thompson wrote, "The whole fr...

This isn’t a long book but it needs to be savored. It isn’t a tirade about Trump but rather an examination of the factors that led to his election. The author names some surprising suspects for someone who was a journalist: the news media, the lack of awareness about their own motives (for money and ratings), the dropping of their responsibility to explain what was really going on. He also blames us for being complacent and for telling ourselves stories that just make things worse. There are no

I've read a number of books by Steve Almond, most notably Candy Freak, Rock 'n Roll Will Save Your Life, and Against Football. He writes about a variety of subjects but always does his due diligence with regard to research. He also is quite adept at integrating his personal experience with the topic at hand. This is a brilliant, thought provoking analysis of the last election and how we got to where we are today. Although an admitted lefty - he did give up a professor position at BC to protest t...

I won this book in a giveaway. I thought that this book offered a good look at the factors leading up to the election of Donald Trump. I really found the discussions of the erosion of fair and balanced journalism to be thought-provoking and scary.