Tamara Tilley

A Personal Stand: Observations and Opinions from a Freethinking Roughneck by Trace Adkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A PERSONAL STAND by Trace Adkins was part autobiographical, part personal commentary, and completely enjoyable.

Anyone who knows Trace Adkins’ music knows there are two sides to the country singer. He’s got his alcohol induced, rebel rousing anthems, such as Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, One Hot Mama, and I Got My Game On. And then there are his introspective tunes like You’re Gonna Miss This, I Wanna Feel Something, She Thinks We’re Just Fishing, and the haunting Arlington. And now, in the pages of A PERSONAL STAND, you get to hear Trace Adkins’ opinion on hot topics like, Immigration, 911, the wars we are waging on foreign soils, the economy, and you get a feel for his passion for history and his beloved South.

I finished A PERSONAL STAND in one day because it was so different from the fiction I usually read. In a word, I would call the country singer with the bad-boy image a conservative. Though he expresses his disappointment with the Republican Party of late, his values and principles line up with what this country was founded on. Freedom. Not the freedom to burn the flag, abuse free speech, or turn the other cheek when others walk all over our constitution, but the freedom to disagree with the government without personal threat, to put in a hard’s day work for a hard’s day pay, the importance of military involvement versus tolerance of radicals, why deportation of illegal’s is not us as a nation being intolerant, but the U.S. needing to protect its borders and following the laws on the books to protect our own economy, and numerous other topics.

A PERSONAL STAND was a great read! Though Adkins’ doesn’t sugarcoat his personal abuses of alcohol or the break-up of his marriages, he sure hits the nail on the head in regards to the state of our union. If we could only rally together the Republicans in office right now, and force them to read our constitution for themselves–instead of allowing the liberal media to interpret it for the nation unchallenged–they could get our country back to the basics of why we left Europe hundreds of years ago. Our forefathers wanted a strong, free, republic, not a hand-holding, passive, milk-toast society that is more interested in being everyone’s friend then wielding our strength when injustice calls for it.

On a personal note: I could’ve done without some of the swearing. I feel strongly that someone does not need to swear or use vulgar language to get their point across. In fact, sometimes I feel the use of inappropriate language devalues the speaker’s impact. Even if you are a good-ole-boy, allow your passion to speak for yourself instead of the shock value of crude language.


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