The Opposite of Woe by John Hickenlooper

The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics by John Hickenlooper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First of all, this book is too long, so right off the bat, you get the impression that Hickenlooper thinks too much of his importance. I read short books and super long books, but I can forgive a lot of writing gaffes if you manage not to waste my time. On the flip side, if your book is a tome, I expect you to provide Anna Karenina-levels of spiritual fulfillment. Don't get me wrong, I also thought Bill Clinton's My Life and Ron Chernow's Grant were too long at twice the length and twice the political importance of this.

Why is it so long? The first 60% of the book focuses on Hickenlooper's early foibles and every woman he ever dated. Some of this background is important so that we can see why he became the type of leader he became, but certainly, not most of it. In defense of this section though, Hickenlooper can be very very funny.

The remaining 40% is the important part, but by that time I'd lost a lot of interest and focus. Considering that Hickenlooper is running for President just 3 years after the publication of this book, there was a noticeable lack of overall policy. Rather, he recounted his process and decisions along the way. While I appreciate that his process is facts-based, as that seems to be lacking in governance these days (though especially in Republican governance), quite often, his fact-gathering was insufficiently comprehensive. Other times he emphasized public opinion over fact-gathering, making for somewhat inconsistent results. For example, I thought his explanation and support for fracking seemed to be lacking in any views inconsistent with the limited facts he'd gathered as an insider in the industry. Okay, he drank some fracking fluid that a government agency said was technically safe for drinking, congratulations. But just off the top of my head, here are some things he failed to investigate or mention: 1) how comprehensive are these government requirements when corporations and conservatives constantly lobby to loosen or remove envirnmental regulations? 2) safe for whom? testing on pregnant women and children is not allowed and at best are a guess. I didn't even take a single Tylenol when I was pregnant, do you honestly think pregnant women drinking fracking fluid is safe when it's not even tested? But this is just one example of his lack of rigorous thinking which stood out mainly because of his constant self-congratulation on his rigorous thinking. Don't get me wrong, he's still 100% better than Trump for the leader of the free world, but that appears to be true also of most people I know.

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