I’m presuming you’ve heard of Alan Alda so I won’t say much about his background apart from dropping the rather broad hint of M*A*S*H, a programme I’ve loved for more years than I care to think about, a programme I’ve watched so many episodes…repeatedly.

This book is some of Alda’s speeches he’s given. As the star of M*A*S*H  he’s been asked to give many speeches in his time and I’d say he’s a good choice as so many people look at his character of Hawkeye Pierce and feel he’s a good influence…I agree being a television star doesn’t necessarily make him the right person for the job but if you look at M*A*S*H  and some of the episodes he’s written you’ll see he’s a very thoughtful man.

Going back to the book for a change. It’s full of speeches but not just the speeches but also the surrounding factors, what made him give the speech, what was happening around the speech and what he was thinking. In some cases it’s the research he was doing in order to give the speech as he was giving a speech to the very people who’d written the books he was reading as research and he figured he’d have to think outside the square in order to say something they didn’t know or couldn’t have written themselves. In this case inspiration arrived with a crash, bang and he not only gave a speech outside the box but also outside the circle encircling the box and it still made sense.

This is the sort of book you’d expect your beloved uncle to write with the sort of advice you’d expect to get from a beloved uncle. I wholeheartedly recommend it but I also recommend you have some tissues with you when he’s talking about 9/11 as that hit him hard.

Here’s the link to buy the book and get me up to the squillions of cents I’m hoping for.