I read Phil Robertson's autobiography.

1. Here, you can buy it on Amazon, as I did.

2. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I know that the GQ article calls it "a ghostwritten book he says he has never read." I assume he talked to the ghostwriter and didn't check the ghost's work by sitting down and reading through the book. I'd be interested to know what books Phil does read. He reads the Bible. I got that. Phil purports to be such a godly man that I feel entitled to believe the book is accurate, but it has the feeling of PR, and I took it in that spirit.

3. My favorite part of the book was the first chapter, his boyhood, especially all the stuff about living off the land:

Nearly everything we ate came from our land. The eggs came from our chickens, the milk and butter from our cows. Bacon and sausage came from the hogs we raised and butchered... My entire family took part in harvesting fruits and vegetables. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had enough to eat. From the beginning of May, when the mayhaws and dewberries ripened, until the end of fall, with the gathering of muscadines and pears, my family and I could regularly be found in the area’s swamps, fields, forests, and abandoned home sites. With our buckets and tubs, from the youngest to the oldest, we would be stooped over or stretched upward gathering whatever fruit was in season.

4. As an adult, he keeps coming back to the land. The orientation toward living independently off one's own land is strong and appealing. He ties it to religion, quoting God in the story of Noah: "Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”

5. I made 5 highlights in my Kindle as I read:

1. In a lot of ways, I was withdrawing from mainstream society. I was trying to drop back about two centuries to become an eighteenth-century man who relied on hunting and fishing for his livelihood. But I was living in the twentieth century, and everything was constantly changing around me.

2. Nothing stands out like a white surrender flag in a duck blind more than a white man’s face! [NOTE: The topic here was the decision to wear face paint.]

3. I’ve always believed that if we did what was morally and ethically right, while continuing to steadfastly believe in what we were doing, we’d end up okay in the end.

4. Now, I’m not a man of great intellectual depth, but it sounds to me like God Almighty has said we can pretty much rack and stack anything that swims, flies, or walks, which I consider orders from headquarters.

5. After studying several political parties to find out what they believe and stand for, I decided my political ideology was more in line with the Republicans. I definitely was no Democrat—that’s for sure—but I don’t really consider myself one or the other. I’m more of a Christocrat, someone who honors our founding fathers and pays them homage for being godly men at a time when wickedness was all over the world. Our founding fathers started this country and built it on God and His Word, and this country sure would be a better place to live and raise our children if we still followed their ideals and beliefs.

6. I liked the stories about taking new opportunities, seemingly in response to the next thing that turned up in front of him, trying to make things work even when he didn't really know what he was doing (like trying to market the duck calls at first with no packaging and no labeling and just walking into a Walmart store as a way to get Walmart to carry his product). It's a nice combination of ambitious entrepreneurship and stubborn refusal to join mainstream society.