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Oct 1, 2010

I am America (and so can you) - Stephen Colbert

I am America (and so can you) - Colbert, Stephen

Summary: "From the host of television's comedy-punditry show The Colbert Report, comes the book to fill the other 23 hours of your day. This book contains all of the opinions that Stephen doesn't have time to shoehorn into his nightly broadcast, his most deeply held knee-jerk beliefs on The American Family, Race, Religion, Sex, Sports, and many more topics, conveniently arranged in chapter form. Stephen addresses why Hollywood is destroying America by inches, why evolution is a fraud, and why the elderly should be harnessed to millstones. You may not agree with everything Stephen says, but at the very least, you'll understand that your differing opinion is wrong"--From publisher description.

Kirkus Reviews
The fabulously fatuous father of "truthiness" and other neocon mantras expands his media icon with the obligatory book—and, read in the proper spirit, it's a lot of fun.So do we take Colbert, of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, seriously? Is he a persona or the real thing? Is he only in it for the money? No, that would be Ann Coulter, or maybe Friedrich Nietzsche, whose autobiography contained chapter titles such as "Why I Am Such a Genius" and "Why I Am Immortal." Colbert has a few more self-doubts than Nietzsche, if only for the sake of modesty. Would fellow blowhard Bill O'Reilly, for instance, ever confess to being frightened by baby carrots? Probably not, though, to judge by his books, O'Reilly would surely endorse Colbert's contention that such seemingly innocent but too-cute things are a gateway drug to gayness. Stranger theories have been proposed (where is Anita Bryant when you need her?), but no satisfactory argument has been mounted against it, and in all events the critics of Colbert are only those who do not "accept Jesus as my personal editor," namely "cable channels, the internet blogs, and the Hollywood celebritocracy, out there spewing ‘facts' like so many locusts descending on America's crop of ripe, tender values." Like John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise, Colbert's litmus test of a book seems meant to be taken seriously only by those who get the joke, in which case the thing is very funny indeed. If, however, it is taken seriously to the point that the reader really starts believing that baby carrots are homoerotogenic, or that Koreans are evil, or that George Bush knows what he's doing, then it's time to take the book gently from that reader and commit said person to a nice quiet spell in the home for the bewildered.The answer, therefore, is yes, take Colbert seriously. Like a heart attack. Or like Lenny Bruce. Copyright Kirkus 2007 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

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