If anyone were to pull you into the deep side of a pool, and you thought you might drown, but then you found that you could swim and you liked it, that would be the feeling of reading this book. Robert Penn Warren writes of Lousiana politician Willie Stark, in a Lousiana long before Katrina, but not so long before politics corrupted and paralyzed the system. But it's not just about politics, or I wouldn't be reading it. It's about every other thing in this world besides that.
Warren is most known for his poetry, and this long, rambling book is filled with poetic moments, grand gestures of philosophical phrases, and the bombastic arrogance of someone who things he knows much more about life than you, and as it turns out, probably does.
Take a pencil, underline the good parts, watch for the cows, the bugs, the road, the twitch, the clock towers, all the things that mean everything and yet still mean just the cow. Absolutely amazing work! And no movie can come close to fulfilling the poetic wonders that fill All the Kings Men's pages. It's simply one of the best works to come out of the south in the 20th century.
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