Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Al Franken

May 2017 · Sold by Twelve

About this ebook

From Senator Al Franken - #1 bestselling author and beloved SNL alum -- comes the story of an award-winning comedian who decided to run for office and then discovered why award-winning comedians tend not to do that.

"Flips the classic born-in-a-shack rise to political office tale on its head. I skipped meals to read this book - also unusual - because every page was funny. It made me deliriously happy." -- Louise Erdrich, The New York Times This is a book about an unlikely campaign that had an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga, which is pretty funny in retrospect. It's a book about what happens when the nation's foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it. It's a book about our deeply polarized, frequently depressing, occasionally inspiring political culture, written from inside the belly of the beast. In this candid personal memoir, the honorable gentleman from Minnesota takes his army of loyal fans along with him from Saturday Night Live to the campaign trail, inside the halls of Congress, and behind the scenes of some of the most dramatic and/or hilarious moments of his new career in politics. Has Al Franken become a true Giant of the Senate? Franken asks readers to decide for themselves.

Ratings and reviews

(Full disclosure: While unaffiliated with Franken's 2008 senatorial campaign, I served voluntarily as a DFL caucus precinct captain supporting his successful endorsement and nomination.) I love Al Franken. He is a champion of truth, a prosecutor of powerful liars, a wide-eyed idealist and a clear-eyed pragmatist. He is also hilarious, subversive, sardonic and trained in the high arts of sarcasm. Franken writes honest, funny and unforgivingly liberal political books that brilliantly explain how progressive policies are good for all of us. His genius is found in the brutal dismantling of conservative "values", deliberately misleading strategies and the crass hypocrisy of right-wing standard bearers who demand absolute moral purity from everyone except themselves. This is why I love Al Franken: you can't write a book about lies and the lying liars who tell them (especially rich, famous and powerful liars) unless the author is beyond reproach. Franken earned his moral authority by sticking to the facts, actually practicing family values his entire life, and quietly doing the right thing for the right reasons. When you've been married for 40 years to the only love of your life, you get to challenge thrice-married virtue proponents who impeached a president for his affair with an intern while engaging in their own extramarital adventures with young women they employed. When you work hard, pay your taxes, value your family, obey the law and follow the rules, you get to evicerate Rush Limbaugh for drug trafficking, drug abuse and amassing his fortune through lies, fearmongering and manipulating the uninformed masses with shameless misinformation.

This book offers a lot of interesting insights into how the government actually works and some of the very real failings of current policies that have allowed so much money to sway and distort our political discourse. Instead of reading it I listened to the audio book, which is narrated by Sen. Franken. Hearing it told in his voice made me feel like I understood him better. It is actually quite a serious book but of course his humor comes through. I had quite a few laugh-out-loud moments. If you're interested in our democracy and disheartened by the direction our country is headed, then this is a book for you.

If anyone had told me I would enjoy a book that spends time looking at today's inner workings of Congress, I would have rolled my eyes. I enjoyed this book a lot, especially Franken's wisdom about getting important work done through collaboration across the aisle and the ideologies. Of course, it's also hilarious.

About the author

Senator Al Franken has represented Minnesota in the United States Senate since 2009. Before entering politics, he was an award-winning comedy writer, author, and radio talk show host. He's been married to his wife, Franni, for 41 years-many of them happy. They have two children, Thomasin and Joe, and three grandchildren. Senator Franken graduated from Harvard College and received his doctorate in right-wing megalomania studies from Trump University.