Book 179: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur

In 2015, news correspondent Katy Tur of NBC was assigned to follow and report on Donald Trump and his presidential campaign. She accepted the assignment with mixed feelings - she knew it would be good for her career, but that the assignment might also wreak havoc on her personal life. She dedicated most of 2015 and all of 2016 to observing and reporting all the news that was fit to print - and some not so much - about the Trump campaign. It was the experience of a lifetime, but I doubt it's one she'd soon repeat.

In this book, Tur documented major developments in the presidential election from May 2015 through November 2016, when Trump was elected to office. Having lived every day of the nightmare that was the Trump campaign and later, the Trump presidency, nothing in this book surprised me. Still, while reading Tur's account, I felt a renewed disgust. She documented Trump's bullying, sexual impropriety, hatred, bigotry, and outright lies. She wrote about Trump hostility toward her and her fellow journalists, and his efforts to discredit both her and the main stream media. She wrote about the shock she felt when Trump called her out in the middle of a rally, effectively making her a target. After that, she had to travel with a security detail, because the "deplorables" saw her as a representative of "fake news," and she feared for her life.

As the saying goes, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." I'm grateful that Tur wrote this book, if only to document the insanity that was (and remains) on display for the whole world to see. Hopefully, we as a country will learn from this experience. May we never forget how we got here.

Katy Tur: If ever I have the honor of meeting you, I'm buying you one big ass glass of wine. You earned it, lady.

Book 141: The Elephant in the Room by Jon Ronson

If everything Jon Ronson (which I keep typing as "Ron Johnson") wrote in this book is true, it explains an awful lot.

I'm not a liberal, and I'm not a conservative. I'm right down the middle on a lot of things. I am a patriot and I love my country, but I am not a nationalist; I don't believe in America first. I believe we are part of a big world and we all need to work together for the best interest of the human race. Yes, I know this is not a political blog, but I want you to know where I stand.

In his formative years, Ronson worked on a journalism project with Alex Jones, who hosts the atrociously bad cable news show InfoWars. He knew Jones personally for a short period of time and like many of us, does not understand Jones's public appeal. Jones is crass, explosive, and makes wild claims such as that human babies are being grown in bottles of Pepsi, inside cows, and on the moon. How he ever got his own show is beyond my comprehension.

Here's the disturbing part: Ronson says that Jones and InfoWars also happens to be our newly elected president's choice media source.

The Kindle version is $2 on Amazon, it's worth reading, just to get a different perspective.