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The Original Rush Limbaugh: Lawyer, Legislator, and Civil Libertarian. By Dennis K. Boman. Missouri Biography Series. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2012. Pp. [xvi], 295. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-1980-0.)
Dennis K. Boman's biography of Rush Hudson Limbaugh Sr., grandfather of the talk-radio personality, provides an insightful local, legal, and social history. Limbaugh's long life, 1891-1996, typified the small-town lawyer of another era-part small businessman, part community leader, part politician.
Boman begins with a detailed discussion of Limbaugh's roots. The descendant of German settlers who came to the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, Limbaugh grew up on a four-hundred-acre farm in southeastern Missouri. Boman provides an up-close portrait of young Limbaugh's rural boyhood. The last of seven children, the future lawyer grew up in what Boman describes as a "poor" but "well-respected and hardworking" family, in what for the time may have been comfortable, though not lavish, surroundings (p. 1). With an academic...