Book Review: Good Advice from Bad People: Selected Wisdom from Murderers, Stock Swindlers and Lance Armstrong by Zac Bissonnette
Disclaimer: I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway on the premise that I would review it.
People love to give advice. Maxims, moral pronouncements, proverbs and detailed instructions on how other people should live their lives drop from people’s lips like pearls and diamonds (or toads and snakes, if we don’t like the advice.) Some folks even make a living out of it!
But often what advisers do is not what they say to do. This is a collection of advice snippets from famous people that for the most part didn’t follow their own sayings. Some are presumably good people who cracked under pressure, others are hypocrites who have a higher standards for others than themselves, and not a few are just plain con artists who used pious phrases while not meaning a word of it.
The people cited in this short volume are mostly contemporary, with a few dips back as far as the Vietnam era. They’re overwhelmingly male, something the author talks about a bit, but from across the political spectrum. The quotations are selected to either be the opposite of what they did in real life, or to have an ironic twist of phrase.
Most of the names will be familiar to anyone who’s paid attention in the last twenty years (Bernie Madoff, for example), but others may surprise you, or even be someone you once respected. The closing has a list of signs that a person might soon be joining the ranks of exposed hypocrites.
There are a number of black and white photographs, and a small bibliography of works the author has mined the quotes from.
As a humor book, it would make a good gift for people who enjoy self-help books and people who favor schadenfreude.
“But where can wisdom be found?
Where does understanding dwell?
No mortal comprehends its worth;
it cannot be found in the land of the living.”–Job 28:12-13
