« June, 2008 »
The Appeal 
by John Grisham (2008)
read: 10 June 2008
rating: [+]
category: fiction
I stayed up until 1 AM reading last night, yet still got up at 6 AM and ran. Yea me! The Appeal is Grisham’s take on dirty politics and the influence of money in elections. A chemical company whose pollution has caused many deaths in backwoods Mississippi loses a million verdict. They decide to win the appeal by stacking the Mississippi Supreme Court. They recruit a nice, polite Christian lawyer to run on a pro-business, pro-family, anti-gay marriage agenda and pump millions into the race from out of state conservative groups with no real interest in Mississippi. The book, as the saying goes, is a page turner. It ties together nicely several issues that come up here frequently. The influence of money on government and the hypocrisy of the religious right. Although to be fair, the social conservative groups in the book are mostly tools being used by big business interests. You know, just like in the real life Republican Party. And it wraps these issues around a fictional story that could easily be true. Grisham’s last book was a true story that read like fiction. The Appeal is fiction that reads like an episode of 48 hours.
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