  READ JOHN POWERS' LATEST COLUMN  [LA Weekly, April 15-21 issue] Read the latest "ON" column from the LA Weekly:The Mortal Storm (see index of all columns) LATEST NEWS  Listen to John Powers discussing "Sore Winners" on NPR's Fresh Air.Read an excerpt of "Sore Winners" from the LA Weekly.Read the AlterNet interview with John Powers. "Powers is news to me. I've never seen a copy of L.A. Weekly, for which he writes about culture and the media; I don't listen to NPR's "Fresh Air," for which he is a film critic; I only glance at the recipes in Gourmet, for which he is an international correspondent. The loss, Sore Winners makes plain, has been mine. He is a clever, quick-witted writer with a gift for the dead-on zinger — the Left's answer to P.J. O'Rourke, David Brooks, Andrew Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell et al., though obviously he's seriously outnumbered — and he seems to have read, listened to, watched and gone online with just about everything. He's a pop-culture omnivore who understands that, like Bush, pop culture has to be taken seriously and that, unlikely though it may seem, there are connections between the two that command attention." [read the full review] "Sore Winners puts it all in perspective. . . . It takes on icons of both the left and the right, decoding the through-the-looking-glass landscape of contemporary American culture."  "A bittersweet, breezy, smart look at current politics in the larger context of American culture — or what passes for it. Enough right-on digs at current icons to cover the cost of admission!"  "'Sore Winners' rises above the shrieking din..."  "With the presidential election looming, Powers' brilliant synthesis and recap is invaluable!" — BOOKLIST "Extremely funny. . . . Is it an incredibly good read! If pop culture and politics are your bread and butter, you'd better believe it!. . . . A momentously entertaining book." — James Norton, FLAKMAG.COM "The best and the most persuasive. . . . the only one to try to tie all of the last 3 1/2 post-traumatic years together!" — THE BUFFALO NEWS "Powers packs more sense in a quick sentence than others can fit into an entire book." — COLORADO SPRINGS INDEPENDENT  Author Events TBA... Current Affairs | Doubleday | Hardcover | July 2004 | $24.95 | 0-385-51187-6 T  he dollars are green. The terror level is orange. And everybody’s seeing red. Welcome to Bush World. Rich, scary, and insanely polarized, America is living through one of the wildest eras in its history. In this delicious hybrid of pop mythology and political commentary, John Powers offers an irreverent guided tour of what he dubs “Bush World”—with its terror attacks and obsession with Martha Stewart, its preemptive wars and celebrations of shopping. Sore Winners takes a fresh new look at the multiple personas of the Real Slim Shady, George W. Bush, the gloating Social Darwinism of shows like Survivor and The Apprentice, and the right-wing triumph of Fox News and the ranting “Id Conservatives.” Whether pondering our two greatest white rappers, Eminem and Donald Rumsfeld, or the amazing rise of Gubna Schwarzenegger, the book paints a freewheeling portrait of a society in which racial politics are symbolized by the “Colin and Condi Show,” gay-marriage opponents battle with Queer Eye’s Fab Five, and religious fundamentalism is everywhere—from Mel Gibson’s Passion to America’s bogeyman, Osama bin Laden. As he charts the sometimes comic tale of the  left’s attempts to escape from Bush World—Michael Moore and Paul Krugman leading the charge—Powers explores the need for liberals to reclaim virtue from sanctimonious conservatives and take back the political agenda.Witty and wide-ranging rather than narrowly political, Sore Winners is one of the smartest, most enjoyable books on American culture in years. Praise For Sore Winners “John Powers’s Sore Winners is an angry but astonishingly good-humored and generous account of the degraded political and media culture of the Bush era. Powers has read everything, watched everything, and come out of his obsession with his sanity and sense of proportion intact. A true populist intellectual, he has a sharp eye for elitism, the cant of the powerful, and the paralyzing dullness of his own side. I can’t imagine a better guide for anyone trying to get his head screwed on right and mount a free-swinging attack on the worst president and the crassest popular culture in recent American history.” —David Denby, New Yorker film critic and author of American Sucker “While reading this funny and engaging book, I felt the hair I had torn out reading David Brooks start to grow back.” —David Rees, author of Get Your War On “Here’s a uniquely tart, perceptive, penetrating assessment of George W. Bush’s unreal White House. It’s taken more than three years, but American writers are finally gaining the measure of how and why this Administration rules the way it does. John Powers gets it – and his passionate, serious, and at times hilarious book will make you wiser, even as it makes you wince at the state of the Union.” —Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Director of American Studies, Princeton University  About the AuthorJOHN POWERS is film critic for Vogue and writes a fortnightly column, "On," for LA Weekly and The Village Voice. He is also critic-at-large for NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross." He lives in Pasadena, CA. with his wife, Sandi Tan.   |
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