Me by Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente: A Political Satire

Description

This is a political satire by one of America's best-loved humorists. Abandoned by his mother at birth, little Clifford Oxnaard grows up in south Minneapolis, tormented by bullies until an encounter with a mail-order body-building course changes his life. Transformed into the six-foot-four 300-pound he-man Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente, he enlists in the U.S. Navy's elite Walrus programme - and is sent to Vietnam. Returning to the States, Jimmy joins a professional wrestling troupe, embarking on a career that takes him to the pinnacle of International World Wrestling, bringing him fame and fortune and introducing him to his hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But it also brings him into conflict with a dangerous death-dealing foe who stalks him relentlessly. Meanwhile, political destiny awaits him . . . Raw, explosive and steamy, Me stands head and shoulders above Dan Quayle's Standing Erect and Newt Gingrich's Things I Finally Figured Out as one of the seminal political memoirs of this or any other time.

Garrison Keillor, 'America's tallest radio humorist', was born in 1942 in a small town in Minnesota, into a family of Scottish fundamental protestants. His father was a railroad clerk and he was the third of six children. As a child, radio and television were discouraged, but the family were expert at entertaining themselves with evenings of storytelling.In 1966 Garrison Keillor graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he earned his tuition working at the campus radio station. His ambition though was to write - three years later the big breakthrough came when he sold a story to the New Yorker. He immediately gave up his job at the radio station to concentrate exclusively on writing but, ironically, it was an assignment from the New Yorker in 1974, which tempted him back to the radio.Writing about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville brought back childhood memories of the warmth and spontaneity of the medium, and the result of this was to be Keil