President Ted Cruz
The 2016 Election and America's Future
by W. Lawrence Lipton


(Click for Amazon book review)

BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org:

This is a crappy book. We got tricked into buying it because the author has a lot of publications, so we figured this would be a decent analysis of Ted Cruz. It is not. With Cruz doing well in the Republican primaries, Cruz biographies are much needed. There are very few good books about Ted Cruz so far -- hence our desire to find a good biography -- but this one doesn't contribute to the list of "good books about Ted Cruz."

The problem is that this book is hardly about Ted Cruz. It provides lots of background on the issues that might be relevant to a Cruz campaign, but doesn't analyze Cruz' positions in the context of those issues. For example, there's a whole chapter on abortion (pp. 83-6) but no mention of Cruz' position (he's pro-life). Maybe the author expects readers to know that, but providing Ted Cruz' position in the context of an analysis of abortion would just seem to make sense, in a book purportedly ABOUT Ted Cruz!

An even worse example is the book's treatment of religion. There's a whole chapter about Ted Cruz' father, Rafael Cruz, who is an Evangelical Minister. But the author makes the same mistake about Rafael as about Cruz -- outlining issues of religion without mentioning where Rafael fits into that outline. The author DOES describe Rafael Cruz' anti-gay marriage stance -- but not Ted Cruz' stance! -- but goes on to a lengthy analysis of the Book of Genesis and other biblical books, with no connection to either Cruz at all.

The author does have the ABILITY to do some decent analysis -- for example, the chapter on Cruz' Canadian birth (and hence whether he is eligible for the presidency) is insightful and detailed. When an author is ABLE to do analysis and just doesn't do it, we call that "lazy." It seems like the author had previously written a bunch of essays -- on abortion, on Genesis, etc. -- and just plopped them together under a cover showing a picture of Ted Cruz. That's lazy!

This book gives a bad name to self-publishing. Amazon offers authors a means to publish without going through conventional publishers -- that's a great idea -- but it lets crappy books like this one slip through. We caution Amazon shoppers to read a few pages of the content of the book before purchasing, and skip this book. We caution Cruz fans to look elsewhere for good analysis, and skip this book too.

-- Jesse Gordon, jesse@OnTheIssues.org, March 2016

OnTheIssues.org excerpts:  (click on issues for details)

Principles & Values     OpEd: definition of "natural born" has wiggle room.

Click for quotations from other sources by: Ted Cruz