American Freak Show: The Completely Fabricated Stories of Our New National Treasures - Hardcover

Geist, Willie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1401323944 ISBN 13: 9781401323943

Publisher: Hyperion, 2010

Synopsis

This is not the first book written about quantum mechanics, but it just might be the last. The theory presented inside these pages is so revolutionary that it has stunned the scientific community into reconsidering centuries of thought about the behavior of energy and matter. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Sorry, that’s the introduction to Willie Geist’s next book—the culmination of his life’s work. Look for it next spring, just in time for Mother’s Day. This book is about his other passion: freaks.

When he’s not in the lab, Geist spends his time on MSNBC’s Morning Joe sifting through the wreckage of American politics and popular culture. These days, that’s a big job. With an Alaska hockey mom turning, almost overnight, into a national icon and threatening to move from Wasilla to the White House, with the world’s most famous athlete now associated less with the Masters and more with the strippers, and with reality TV working around the clock to ensure the constitutional right of every man, woman, and child to fifteen minutes of fame, Geist’s business is thriving.

In his hilarious first book, American Freak Show, Geist takes the smart, biting observation loved by his television audience to new satirical extremes. The real-life characters who now haunt our daily lives are cast as stars in completely made-up scenes that, frankly, are not all that far from reality.

Geist treats us to the first look at President Sarah Palin’s unconventional inaugural address, performed live on WWE’s Monday Night Raw after her renegade victory in the 2012 election. We go inside the ballroom for a Dean Martin–style welcome roast of Bernie Madoff upon his arrival in Hell, with Pol Pot serving as sidesplitting roastmaster. Geist provides us with never-before-seen FBI wiretap transcripts of the more mundane, but equally profane, telephone conversations of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. And George W. Bush’s batting-cage-and-waterslide-themed plans for a presidential library are laid out publicly for the first time.

From Obama to Oprah, Afghanistan to Lohan, and Snooki to the Salahis, Willie Geist spares no one as our host of this wild American Freak Show. You’ll laugh out loud while weeping for the future of America.

About this title

About the Author:

Willie Geist is host of MSNBC's Way Too Early with Willie Geist and co-host of Morning Joe and is a contributor to many NBC News programs. Geist also hosts Zeitgeist, a satirical video blog on MSNBC.com.

From Publishers Weekly:

For his first book Geist, from MSNBC's Way Too Early and Morning Joe, imagines private conversations, e-mail exchanges, Twitter feeds, speeches, and other scenarios involving top newsmakers from our time. Such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, Kate Gosselin, Tiger Woods, Levi Johnston, and "President" Sarah Palin are subjected to Geist's wooden, repetitive send-ups. As Geist tells it, most everyone-including all 20th century presidents-seem to be identical to each other, right down to their speech patterns: they are arrogant, lack self-awareness, and have a penchant for swearing. While they may, indeed, share certain qualities, individual personalities are lost on Geist. Occasional "true story" vignettes about real-life "freaks" feature much fresher and funnier content; while recounting a news story in which a man was arrested for pleasuring himself with a coin-operated car wash vacuum, Geist muses, "One assumes Whitesnake was playing on the radio." Clearly commentary, rather than storytelling, is Geist's strength, so it's a shame that narratives make up the bulk of this effort.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1401323944
• ISBN 13: 9781401323943
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240