Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?

"You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You brings together a first-class collection of smart, spirited, and fiercely funny writings. From the wild and woolly politics of her native Texas to the waffling in the Oval Office, Molly exposes the fatuous and hypocritical at all levels of public life. Whether she's writing about the 1996 presidential candidates ("Dole contributed perhaps the funniest line of the year with his immortal observation that tobacco is not addictive but that too much milk might be bad for us. The check from the dairy lobby must have been late that week"), conspiracy theorists ("Twenty-five years in the newspaper bidness have given me a fairly strong faith in the proposition that if you haven't read about it in The Daily Disappointment or seen it on the network news, it's probably not true"), or cultural trends ("I saw a restaurant in Seattle that specialized in latte and barbecue. Barbecue and latte. I came home immediately"), Molly takes on the issues of the day with her trademark good sense and inimitable wit.

Molly Ivins began her career in journalism in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. In 1970, she became coeditor of The Texas Observer, which afforded her frequent fits of hysterical laughter while covering Texas legislature. In 1976, Ivins joined The New York Times as a political reporter. The next year, she was named Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief, chiefly because there was no one else in the bureau. In 1982, she returned once more to Texas, which may have indicated a masochistic streak, and always had plenty to write about after that. Her column was syndicated in more than three hundred newspapers, and her freelance work appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper's, and other publications. Her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her books with Lou Dubose on George W. Bush—Shrub, Bushwhacked, and Who Let the Dogs In?—were national bestsellers. A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, she claimed that her two greatest honors were that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M. Molly Ivins died in 2007.