Your Daily Newt: “Gingrich Has Done It Again”

Pete Marovich/ZumaPress.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

Newt Gingrich’s appetite for reading is notorious. He’s a speed-reader, and friends and aides like to tell stories about Gingrich walking around in circles, moving his fingers across the pages of some massive history book. So it was only natural that, when his political talents were no longer in high demand in Washington, the former speaker reinvented himself as an Amazon.com reviewer. Between 2005 and 2008, Gingrich penned 156 reviews—all positive—at the online retailer, on subjects ranging from Civil War novels to science fiction and longform journalism. Here’s one I’ve selected totallly at random, which will doubt endear him to the GOP’s social conservative base:

Dave Freedman’s Natural Selection is just plain fun. It is pop-Darwinism carried to its ultimate extreme, but it stresses your mind, gets you to wonder about the species that could be in the ocean deep and reminds you that things aren’t always the way they seem. While this book is fantasy rather than science, it brings just enough science and high technology in to make you pay constant attention. The intelligence of the dangerous new species makes this a cross between Jaws and Michael Crichton’s description of intelligent nano-biology. I recommend it for pure fun and for getting you to think a little differently about the possibilities on our planet.

Gingrich, whose weakness for adverbs is a matter of public record, adopted a new set of rhetorica; tics in his reviews. As Dave Weigel noted:

Gingrich was a master of blurb-speak; it’s a surprise he didn’t end up cited on the back covers of more paperbacks. On Robert B. Parker’s thriller Potshot: “Parker has done it again.” On Mark Bowden’s drug war classic Killing Pablo: “Bowden has done it again.” On Ken Follett’s Jackdaws: “Follett has done it again.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate