Slog

News & Arts

The Stranger Suggests

Critics' Best Bets
Music Arts & Food

Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

  |  

Monday, March 4, 2013

Books Dot-Com Dot-Gov

Posted by on Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 1:13 PM

(Gavin Newsom appears tonight at Town Hall. Tickets are $5.)

books-click.jpg
Look: It's not that every politician has to be a gifted writer. Nobody expects California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom's new book, Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government (The Penguin Press, $25.95), to be Dreams from My Father, or even The Audacity of Hope. But the fact that Newsom needed to pull a cowriter in (Lisa Dickey is credited on the cover with a "with," but that's the only mention the poor woman gets at all) to produce this tepid mess of corporate-speak and junior-TED-Talk blather is especially disheartening.

To be fair, Newsom is attempting a difficult dance here: He's trying to draw a nonpartisan or politically disenfranchised audience that may or may not know anything about the worlds of government or technology. Which is to say, he has to not only explain how a Facebook sharing model can be applied to civic governance, he also has to explain what Facebook is and how city governments work.

But that doesn't justify moronic passages like this: "I've always loved the acronym KISS—for 'keep it simple, stupid,'" and "In December 2009, a flock of birds was released upon the world. But not just any birds—Angry Birds."...

Keep reading >>

 

Comments (0)

Comments are closed.

Advertisement
 

Want great deals and a chance to win tickets to the best shows in Seattle? Join The Stranger Presents email list!


All contents © Index Newspapers, LLC
1535 11th Ave (Third Floor), Seattle, WA 98122
Contact Info | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Takedown Policy