Uncle Sam's Plantation, by Star Parker

What seems like a compassionate government run welfare system is actually helping keep the poor in poverty.  And poverty means enslavement to the government system that purports to be the solution.  The liberal politicians seem to be helping, when in reality they are hurting, those who live in poverty, particularly among the African American population.  We hear all this from a woman who lived in this systematic slavery for years.

This is my first encounter with Star Parker, and my first attempt at reading a partisan, economic, political book.  I put it off forever, thinking I would hate in, when in fact I really enjoyed reading it.  At first.  My enthusiasm waned a little, not because of Parker's views or my lukewarm agreement with some of them.  Nay, I did not mind at all her ultra conservative views of social issues, despite the fact I disagreed with a few of them.  What made the book just a tiny bit tedious is that it was a bit repetitive.

My husband reads political and economic books a lot, and says that this is common.  Often, the author will have a legitimately good or groundbreaking topic and point of view, but it may not be enough to fill an entire book, so the same points will be stated, and restated, and reworded and restated, multiple times throughout the book.  And that was exactly what I found in this case.  So, I could have done with about 50 less pages of text, which would have staved off some of the repetition.

That being said, I thought that a lot of the points made were quite solid, although unpopular.  Parker is particularly hard on African Americans, and laments the fact that as a black woman, she gets called a "sell out' or "Uncle Tom" for expecting more from her race.  She says that success among blacks should be the norm, instead of the exception to the rule as it is now.  I quite enjoyed the book, and will most likely read more from Parker in the future.

I received a review copy of this book courtesy of Booksneeze.