A Month of Italy

My sister-in-law gave me this book called A Month of Italy.  It's written by Chris Brady, who started the pyramid scheme called Life Leadership my brother and sister-in-law are currently enthralled of.  God bless 'em, they probably thought, "She likes Italy, here's a book on Italy, what could go wrong?" and under that good faith I did make a relative effort to read this damn thing and I was curious what kind of covert message hid inside that might make me want to throw aside all reason and join a goddamn pyramid scheme.  I was not able to read every word, finding the writing and sentiment offensive from literally the first page, but I honestly did make a valiant effort at skimming the damn thing.

Page one starts with a little slut-shaming for no good reason aside from it's probably good to put women in their place.  "One young lady, in the early bloom of her maturity and obviously intending to be sexy, is wearing a dress so tight old women shake their heads while young men find reasons to stop and turn."  Italian women (and men), according to Chris Brady, wear bathing suits entirely outside the realm of human decency, and to make sure, spends plenty of time looking at them. Basically he and his family go to Italy for a month, drive around in a small bus with their 4 or 5 children and generally make asses of themselves, gives a big speech at the end about how much the trip changed and restored him (unclear how) and how a bunch of people said "You should write a book about it" so he did.

As far as I can tell, Chris Brady, who claims to be some kind of leadership guru, makes most of his money writing shitting books which are pawned off on unsuspecting souls like my aforementioned bro and his wife. I'm truly curious about hearing what happens at this frequent "leadership" meeting they attend but they don't like to talk about it.  Possibly they pick up tips like the ones I found on Chris Brady's blog post entitled 6 Mistakes Public Speakers Make like "Being Boring" or "Being Nervous."  No joke. So, no "leadership" stuff in the book, no overt Christian stuff until the acknowledgements, just a bunch of crap about how the food is so good you can literally walk into any restaurant and it'll be good (not true) and how everyone should go to Italy for a month to really relax.  The tone-deaf persistence that not everyone can afford to go to Europe, much less spend a month there driving from resort to resort with 6 people is downright offensive, especially since this guy's business is preying on cash-poor people like my brother with the promise that they're going to be "leaders" one day.