Pick a Better Country - Softcover

Hamblin, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684843188 ISBN 13: 9780684843186

Publisher: Free Press, 1997

Synopsis

The New York Times columnist and host of a nationally syndicated talk-radio program speaks his mind on a variety of issues facing today's African-American community, including welfare, discrimination, and revitalization of the American Dream. Reprint. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

Ken Hamblin has been called the black Rush Limbaugh, but it might be better to call Limbaugh the white Ken Hamblin. Liberals will find this book hard-going, but it ought to be required reading for anyone concerned about the plight of black America. A former Army newspaper photographer and film producer-turned-newspaper-columnist and talk-radio host, Hamblin is a tough-minded commentator, unafraid to speak his mind about matters of race and class in America. Liberals, in his view, aren't just liberals; they're "egg-sucking dog liberals" whose patronizing concern for blacks has led to a debilitating inability of many blacks to do for themselves. In Pick a Better Country, which is a mix of autobiography and polemic, Hamblin fulminates against a familiar roster of evils--drugs, welfare, unwed mothers--interspersing his commentary with anecdotes from his life that illustrate how he persevered, and succeeded, in America.

From Publishers Weekly:

Denver-based syndicated radio talk-show host Ken Hamblin rides Harleys, flies airplanes and has been called "the black Rush Limbaugh." While he has neither provoked the following nor the counterattacks that Limbaugh has, his book?a mix of autobiography and rant?shows both the strengths and weaknesses of conservative talk radio. Citing his personal experience growing up on welfare in Brooklyn, Hamblin offers himself as living proof that poverty need not preclude personal responsibility or be used as an excuse for not seeking advancement. Similarly, he excoriates white liberals and black leaders for extolling rap music and the street argot of underclass culture. He calls that culture "black trash," a term he justifies as a racial counterpart to the more common "white trash." Hamblin's other memorable terms are talk-radio pejoratives: "brood mares" for teen welfare mothers; "egg-sucking dog liberals" for white liberals who ally with black "poverty pimps" to hobble blacks' sense of self-reliance. Unfortunately, Hamblin's political analysis is talk-radio shallow, made up of self-help bromides, pep-rally exhortations about the American dream and mud pies flung at liberals' "socialist" agenda and the alleged personal failings of welfare recipients. Hamblin offers volume?but no serious reflection on the forces creating the underclass. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684843188
• ISBN 13: 9780684843186
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256