Mark Chiusano

Wow! Hilarious and tragic at the same time. I have followed Santos coverage in the New York Times, and I knew the basics of a lot of Santos's cons, but this goes deeper. The book also looks at Nassau County politics. Nassau County (where I briefly lived, for 9 months I think), is a hodgepodge of Republicans. The power rests with the overprivileged racist Republicans in places like Manhasset and Great Neck (whom the author notes still bear the hallmarks of East Egg and West Egg that Fitzgerald wrote about.) Those folks celebrate any opportunity to show they are not racists/homophobes (so long as they don't actually have to stop being racist homophobes.) Praise be when they find a gay Brazillian man with a long history of drag performance who yells plenty loud about how Drag Story Hour is an abomination and suggests that we should take away the citizenship of the children of undocumented immigrants. (They do not know that we can't, but why bother with the Constitution.) The county also houses the very middle-class denizens of places like Levittown and Massapequa who have been watching the aforementioned people stockpile assets and so they strive to be them. They are similarly miffed that things like equity and fairness are ruining America. Midwesterners, Southerners, and rugged square states residents with the same disregard for truth or integrity and love for conspiracy theories are covered by centrist and left-leaning news organs, but the people who brought us George Santos stay in the shadows. This is valuable info and the book is absolutely worth the read for anyone who cares about America.

One note: I listened to the audiobook for this, and the reader was mostly fine, but he mispronounced every Jewish word other than mishegoss, which he got right. He also mispronounced the name of the county for the first 70% of the book, after which I guess someone told him how to pronounce it, but they did not fix the many many times he pronounced Nassau as NuhSOW. It was grating.… (más)