Fred Thompson's Book Comes Out Tomorrow!
It is still Memoir Season for all Republicans who had any power or influence whatsoever between 2001 and 2009. Meanwhile, Fred Thompson is also writing a book! It's about his life as a Real American, and features some authentic, folksy prose from the crack team of unpaid ghostwriters working out of the slave shed at Fred Thompson's Northern Virginia mansion. As for the title, Teaching the Pig to Dance is at least in the ballpark of what you'd imagine Fred Thompson would drum up, while poopin' on his golden mansion toilet.
Let's check out the first paragraph of the official product description:
Fred Thompson has enjoyed a remarkable career in Hollywood and politics, but when he sat down to write a memoir about how he got to be the person he is, he discovered that his best stories all seemed to come out of the years he spent growing up in and around his hometown of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. It was a small town but not the smallest—after all, it was the county seat and it did have a courthouse, a couple of movie theaters, and its own Davy Crockett statue. For truly small, you had to travel to nearby Summertown, where the regular Sunday dinner was possum and chocolate gravy.
Ha ha ha, nice dig at poor, poor, disease-ridden Summertown.
But Lawrenceburg is where Fred got to be a kid, get in his share of trouble and scrapes, get to know folks he didn’t realize were so colorful at the time but sure does now, get married, have a few kids, become a man, and start his career as a country lawyer (pretty much in that order). And as Fred tells it, getting that law degree was something of a surprise for him, since in school he’d been less than stellar as a scholar. “Teaching Latin to someone like me,” he says, “was like trying to teach a pig to dance. It’s a waste of the teacher’s time and it irritates the pig.”
"Also, Latin's for fags."
A fine read, to be sure. Can you even wait until tomorrow to learn more about how it came as a "surprise" to Fred Thompson that he got a law degree, after spending three years at law school?
[ Amazon ]