Our Revolution, Bernie Sanders

Our Revolution:  A Future to Believe In by Bernie Sanders is a book I have wanted to read since it came on the market.  I really need to understand his broad positions well before 2020 rolls around.

Started:  11/5/2017

Completed: 1/12/2018

Recommendation: Recommended

Recommended By:  my wife

Review:

Bernie Sandars articulates many views that I have come to independently in Our Revolution.  Part I of the book is how he decided to run for the presidency.  This is interesting, but insanely detailed.  I think I would have benefited from 20 or so pages, not the 200 it was assigned.  For someone who really wants to know Bernie, however, this material is important.  I read the vast majority and skipped the last 20 or so pages as I just got tired of hearing about another meeting where several hundred people showed up and talked about how their lives sucked.  Maybe Bernie's point was that many people have the same frustrations.  If so, he made it resoundingly.

The second part was more about his policies and I found this more interesting.  Unfortunately, this part of the book reads like Bernie speaks.  He makes his point many, many times on many, many issues.  Another 300 pages of excruciating detail.  I probably would have found this wonderful if I already did not know the material.  Over and over I got statistics, charts, and graphs with which I was well familiar.  One area where I learned something really good was in the Native People's section, but it was about 3 pages.

So, this book will tell you why Bernie says what he says.  If you want to know the back story, it is incomparable.  There are a lot of tax raises and service raises.  There are talks of international agreements, partnerships, and scornful international companies.  This is all great.  I really could have used a summary at the back, a table perhaps, that was a balance sheet that showed how the tax increases paid for the service increases.  Maybe some projections on what the anticipated growth rates would be for the economy due to which factor and how that would look over the long time lines (sometimes 15-20 years) in which Bernie thinks.  That would have been awesome even if it had been wrong, because it would have given me some sense of the investment that America should be making in itself.  Maybe, in my retirement, I'll be able to figure all that out and build the table that I think is missing.  Hmmm.