Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life

Author: Michael Medved
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
December 2004

FROM THE PUBLISHER
Nationally syndicated talk-radio host and noted film critic Michael Medved has taken an extraordinary journey from liberal activist to outspoken conservative. Along the way he has earned millions of admirers-and more than his share of enemies-by advancing controversial, often counterintuitive arguments, including:

In the candid, electrifying Right Turns, Medved chronicles the adventures that taught him these and many other lessons-the startling events that propelled him from Vietnam protest leader to optimistic promoter of American patriotism, from secularism to religion, from adventurous single guy to doting husband and father. In the process he skewers leftist orthodoxy, revealing why the Right is right and why his former colleagues on the Left remain hopelessly wrong on every cultural, political, and social issue.

Medved enters today's ideological fray armed with experience as, among many other things, a campaign aide for radical Democrats, a minority recruiter for police departments, a Hollywood screenwriter, a Bobby Kennedy volunteer, a teacherat religious schools, a world-champion hitchhiker, an expert on bad movies, and a veteran TV host on PBS and a British network-who declines to own a TV himself.

Medved relishes the contradictions behind the high-profile controversies in which he's played a leading role-as a prominent movie reviewer who attacked the film industry in a bestselling book, as an observant Jew whose radio show is a favorite with evangelical Christians, as a writer once designated the "Bard of the Baby Boomers" who now expresses contempt for his generation's arrogant indulgence, and as a fearless battler who has sought advice from both Rush Limbaugh and Hillary Clinton and has given advice to both Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand.

Right Turns displays the slashing argument and disarming wit that have made Medved's radio program America's number one show on politics and pop culture.