Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report

Rating:
Summary: Most of his lessons are apparently learned the easy way...
Review: For insight into Gingrich, one should skip this book and instead read his extensive set of Amazon reviews. Yes -- Newt Gingrich writes lots of reviews on Amazon! And not a single pan! Everything gets four stars or more, suggesting that Newt may be burdened by a seriously unsceptical mind.

And it's not all Toffler and Deming. He reads novels, history, and science books, and seems to have a military fetish. The reviews are generally well-written and useful, but Gingrich may overestimate the importance of books. On Kissinger's "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" he writes, "This is a book the Bush Administration can use for sophisticated planning." I can just see Dubya, Cheney and Condy huddled over a dog-eared copy of Kissinger's book, marking up their map of geopolitical chessboard.

Rating:
Summary: Candid apologies get depressing, glimmer of hope at end.
Review: I've been a fan of Newt Gingrich ever since I read "Window of Opportunity" back in 1984 and I used to watch his special order speeches on the House floor on C-SPAN long after the rest of the country had gone to bed. I thought I would enjoy hearing from my role model, in his own words, why the 104th and 105th Congress stalled, shot itself in the foot repeatedly, and allowed our character-challenged president take credit for things he didn't do.

I was wrong.

Although I have a better understanding now of the events surrounding Congress over the last several years, I found the litany of apoligies and excuses depressing. I miss the visionary Newt, and the last chapter, which describes Newt's "4 goals for our generation" felt like an afterthought.

All in all, I'm glad Newt wrote this book, and it should be required reading for all Republicans, but don't expect to put the book down feeling inspired 'cause it isn't going to happen. Newt: catharsis is good for the soul, but please start looking forward instead of backward.

Rating:
Summary: Tragic
Review: Like many liberals, I had little time for the Gingrich revolution and was convinced it would wreck America. Since my predictions were made in half jest, even I could have not imagined the cavalcade of stupid comments and smug answers.

For a party allegedly oppsed to government waste, Newt and company were perfect poster boys. Between government shutdowns, airforce one tantrums and partisan investigations, they did a pretty good job wasting the tax payers money.

Rather than trying to salvage his repuatation (what little there is)we get more of the same self-serving garbage. Newt, apparently unaware that his fifteen minutes of fame expired long ago, has again set himself up as a deranged messiah. One can gradually ernvison his head expanding to scarier proportions in each chapter....I'm glad I was not around to clean up the resulting mess.

Devout newtoids will like this, but the majority of intellegent readers will not.

Rating:
Summary: Newt?
Review: Newt who? Is he still around? Put a fork in him...he's done.

Rating:
Summary: Newt?
Review: Newt who? Is he still around? Put a fork in him...he's done.

Rating:
Summary: A no-nonsense analysis from someone who was there
Review: This is a wonderful book for anyone curious about the remarkable times in which we live, the influence of public policy on our lives, the process of ideological legislation, and the limitations of power. In the amazing heat of the American style of public policy debate, Mr. Gingerich carves out a moment of historical perspective: nothing in American democracy is swift, nothing is certain.

His personal journey through the classic struggle between the Pragmatic and the Romantic is filled with surprising frankness and great personal charm.

I loved the book, and would recommend it highly.

With remarkable clarity he illustrates the institutional obstacles to change which make American Democracy and its historical traditions such a fascinating and contradictory experience.

Mr. Gingerich presides over the Congress in a time of incredible societal change as nearly all working Americans move strongly into capital investments and technology is in the earliest stages of transforming the workplace from the last hundred years into the next hundred years.

While the fierce ideological struggles of the present time will be forgotten within ten years as America transforms itself, Mr. Gingerich's book with its engaging historical perspective over the intensely personal politics of the present time, will stand as great advice to those men and women on how to fight the battles which will determine the new rules, as information and its access shapes the coming struggles over economic and cultural life in the twenty first century.

Other recommended reading: Alone , Winston Churchill by William Manchester - also a great political biography set in an historical perspective. The book is much larger but contains many of the same lessons for visionary leaders in times of transistion.