Here Comes Trouble

Here Comes Trouble by Michael Moore

Love him or hate him, pretty much everybody knows who he is - in case you don't, he's the Oscar-winning American filmmaker who has challenged corporations, the U.S. education system, the U.S. health care system and the NRA in his controversial documentaries. 

Moore's opinions are well laid out, both on the screen and on the page - he has written 7 previous non-fiction books.  To be honest, I have found his books to be repetitive and unnecessarily rant-y.  I would have said that his strengths lie more in film than in prose.

However, this book changes my mind.  It turns out that his strengths lie in storytelling above all else.

In "Here Comes Trouble" Moore shares 20 vignettes mostly from his early life, from the death-threats fallout from the Oscar speech he gave, to getting lost as an 11-year old on a visit to Congress and getting found by Senator Bobby Kennedy, to stories of his great grandfather, to his father's WWII experience as an influence on his pacifism and beyond. 

What I found amazing was how who he becomes on the world stage - an activist, stubbornly willining to stick his neck out and stand up for what he believes no matter what - is shaped by his ancestory and some key experiences whose lessons he took to heart early on (ie. his first newspaper started in the fourth grade, was promptly shut down in the fourth grade and he learned to persevere). 

As a study in finding your purpose in life, this book is it.  Also, it is funny and poignant and compulsively readable.