Dispatches From the Culture Wars Review

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(More customer reviews)In my experience when a book's title has a colon in it, I find that what precedes the colon is usually a nonspecific (sometimes punny) metamessage, while what follows the title is usually what the book is actually about. With that in mind, I expected the book to be about "how the left lost teen spirit." While there were, to be sure, portions of the book devoted to that issue, that was always based solely on Goldberg's own experiences and nothing more. I found that the rest of the book was a kind of Cliff Notes (i.e. condensed) autobiography of Goldberg's own career in music combined with some of the most flagrant and copious name-dropping I have seen in a long time. I suppose that a more accurate subtitle would have been: "How the left lost teen spirit based primarily on my own anecdotal experience as a record executive interested in politics and specifically based on my run-ins with Joe Lieberman and Tipper Gore over the issue of attempted consorship of record content." In fact, while I wholeheartedly agreed with all of Goldberg's opinions and conclusions on this specific issue, I still felt that the discussion of this issue took up way too much of the book (which is perhaps not surprising given my complaint above).
The subtitle was also troubling to me in that it begs the question: When did that spirit last exist? In other words, if the left "lost" teen spirit, what is the time frame Goldberg is using for when it last had it? It would appear that he may be referring way back to the Kennedy adminstration as the answer to that question. If so, that is troubling for 2 reasons. First, 40 years is way too long a time frame to assume that the left has had no "teen spirit". Is Goldberg suggesting that it existed in 1963 and prior, but not since? That is doubtful. Indeed, while not dispositive of whether the left has lost teen spirit, it should at least be noted that Democrats have won 4 of 10 elections since Kennedy's assasination (and 5 of 10 if one considers the 2000 election as a Democratic victory).
If Goldberg instead had in mind a more recent date for when the left last had teen spirit, it should have been specified more clearly so that the reader can compare and contrast what life was like when they had it and when they didn't. However Goldberg never really goes there. He points out how it is lacking in the past few years but never really tells us how the given issues might have been addresed (and by whom) at that (never identified) time when the spirit still exised.
A footnote: Having read "Shakedown" by Kenneth Timmerman, I was nauseated by Goldberg's constant paeans to Jessie Jackson, notwithstanding the fact that Jackson may not have tried a shakedown in the specific Eric Kronfeld/Polygram incident to which Goldberg refers.
In sum, while one might think that it is a benefit to have a book on this topic written by an "insider" (or at least a semi-insider), I feel that a book on a similar topic written by an outsider might have been more valuable since its focus would not have been so strongly tied solely to the experiences of one individual. In my mind, an example of a book on almost the exact same topic which did a better job of it is "Speaking Frankly" by Barney Frank. (In keeping with my rule for titles with colons in them, the portion of the title which precedes the colon is a pun--i.e. a play on Frank's name--while what follows--"What's Wrong With the Democrats and How to Fix It"--is what the book is actually about.) Even though the book [has been out for years] (Clinton was not even President!), it is still surprisingly applicable to the state of the Democratic party today. Moreover, because it is not confined, in tunnel vision fashion, to the author's own experiences, I felt that it was able to describe the problem more effectively than does Goldberg.

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