HOSTILE TAKEOVER Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America
that may have been due to the genetic disease Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Kean’s talent also shines in the sections on scientific rivalries, such as that between biologist Craig Venter’s private company Celera and the government-funded Human Genome Project, both of which are racing to sequence all human DNA. In an impressive narrative, the author renders esoteric DNA concepts accessible to lay readers.
I AM JENNIE
Ketcham, Jennie Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-1-4516-4476-0 A former porn star’s account of her disillusionment with the industry and quest to forge a new identity. This is the type of book that tells all and says little. In his introduction, addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky praises his former patient’s bravery and candor in sharing her story. However, Ketcham’s insistence on seeding her narrative with pornographic vignettes may be candid, but it is not illuminating. In fact, nearly every sex scene obscures more than it reveals. For example, the book opens with a profoundly unsexy play-by-play of a sexual encounter with another woman described with such clinical detachment that it’s impossible to tell whether Ketcham was being paid to participate. To some extent, this confusion is the point. The author claims to have felt real desire almost as often as she faked it, which makes it difficult to maintain a distinction between her lovers and the people with whom she was paid to have sex. Her paid work was at least occasionally thrilling; having sex with certain unpaid partners was artificial and joyless. Rather than examining these potentially fruitful distinctions, Ketcham blithely glides over them, leaving readers more often bemused than enlightened. Her inability to distinguish between real and fake compromises her writing as much as it did her love life, and she often appears to be an unreliable narrator: Can parents who regularly abused alcohol and drugs in front of their children accurately be characterized as “not abusive?” Ketcham is obviously a spirited, intelligent and painfully earnest young woman who wants others to learn from her mistakes, but her understanding of herself and the world around her is too limited to make her story instructive.
Kibbe, Matt Morrow/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $26.99 | Jun. 19, 2012 978-0-06-219601-9
FreedomWorks president Kibbe (Rules for Patriots, 2010, etc.) attempts to make the Tea Party case for smaller, less expensive government. The author’s primary target is the “unholy alliance between big business and big government.” While this sounds much like a grievance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Kibbe contends that OWS differs from the Tea Party because of the former’s lack of respect for private property rights and because OWS advocates using government to curb business, an approach doomed to failure because it “ignores the political power of big business to effectively lobby government for favors.” In a jaunty style replete with pop-culture references, the author presents critiques of progressivism and of such standard conservative bugbears as the Federal Reserve, the Internal Revenue Code and the Department of Education. He marshals compelling statistics and diverting anecdotes that effectively portray his targets as examples of an expensive and unaccountable government run amok. His solutions, however—a return to the gold standard, a flat income tax, more school choice, etc.—are utterly predictable, and the text is liberally larded with right-wing cant, unsupported contentions and tired tropes like “We the People.” Though he promises to show how the Tea Party will “return power from self-appointed ‘experts’ back to the people,” this is no trumpet call for specific popular action. Even elections are apparently not really critical; “real change,” writes Kibbe, “isn’t really about political power anyway…It’s about the paradigm shift, from the top-down to the bottom-up.” The author suggests only that readers “embrace the beautiful chaos of citizen action and, by our movement’s success, prove that freedom works.” A rambling exposition of Tea Party grievances with the tone of preaching to a rather bored choir.
SIXTY MILES OF BORDER An American Lawman Battles Drugs on the Mexican Border Kirkpatrick, Terry Berkley (336 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-425-24762-4
A behind-the-scenes look at the adventures of a U.S. Customs special agent on the front lines of the drug wars. Retired agent Kirkpatrick reflects on his nearly 30 years spent patrolling the 60-mile stretch of land between Arizona’s Santa Cruz County and Sonora, Mexico. The author’s 1140
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1 june 2012
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nonfiction
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kirkusreviews.com
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