Audiobook - The Residence, Inside the Private World of the White House - Kate Andersen Brower
I think this was the most boring audiobook I have ever listened to. It took me months to finally finish because I found it so difficult to make myself turn it on. However I am not a DNFer so I persisted.
I'm absolutely sure Kate Andersen Brower has done her research, unfortunately I cannot work out how she organised her material into a book. I have some obvious suggestions about how such a book could be organised:
- by era/persident
- by area of the house
- by interviewee
However, she picked none of these obvious options and simple - rambled? One minute we are talking about Obama lack of comfort with being waited on. The next we are learning about Lyndon Johnson's crazy shower antics (he sounds like an awful, awful man btw). I never quite knew what was going on although some of the anecdotes were interesting.
My other problem was with the aggrandizement of low wage employees who (happily) work too many hours and never speak ill of the first family while neglecting their own families for the greater good. This is not good. Workers should have rights and fair pay and be allowed to go home on time. It gives me an icky 'happy mammy' stereotype, especially since so many of the staff members were and are black Americans.