The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival
(Broadside, $35)
“Who actually is Ron DeSantis?” asked Andrew Egger in The Dispatch. The Florida governor remains “somewhat elusive” as a personality even as he has emerged as the most formidable potential challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. So it’s disappointing that DeSantis’ best-selling new memoir, “even by the standards of campaign autobiographies,” turns out to be “highly parsimonious” with details about the author’s early life and political formation. It does mention he was raised in a blue-collar Florida home and played baseball at Yale. But it devotes most of its energy to attacking elites. On that score, the book “manages to stand out for pure venom.”
The book makes DeSantis’ political character easy to read, said Chris Lehmann in The Nation. “At virtually every inflection point in his public career, the same underlying refrain emerges: I was driven to adopt draconian measures because the Left made me do it.” Many of the actions he boasts of are “chilling,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. In his four years as Florida’s chief executive, he has outlawed classroom discussion of sexual orientation through third grade and restricted how race and gender are discussed in private businesses, which “looks an awful lot like thought policing.” Because the book is aimed less at voters than at the Republican donor class, DeSantis also makes clear that businesses can trust that he wouldn’t be a president who’d impose stiff taxes or regulations.
He comes across as “wildly self-confident, but also dour,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “A line or two may approach something like humor, but I did not detect a proper joke.” Still, GOP primary voters may connect with the focused rage he delivers in this so-called memoir, which is “better thought of as a manifesto on the folly of nearly everything our academic and political experts have been saying for the past quarter-century.” Its tone, said Manuel Roig-Franzia in The Washington Post, “foreshadows what would surely be an irascible campaign.”