A more positive view of Donald Trump than most Americans have—though the text ends with the election.
Two journalists team up, conduct more than 100 interviews with key figures in (and out of) Camp Trump, and conclude his decision to run for president was far from impulsive.
In Hamlet, Polonius said of the prince’s psychological state, “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Salkin (From Scratch: Inside the Food Network, 2013, etc.) and Short, both of whom have written for the New York Post, set out to prove that the same is true of President Donald Trump. The text comprises snippets of interviews with a variety of sources, from Al Sharpton and Gloria Allred to Anthony Scaramucci and Steve Bannon. (The entire list of contributors, which includes journalists, political figures, and advisers, consumes eight pages.) The authors also chime in continually throughout the 32 chapters. They endeavor to show a different Trump than the one many imagine. Here is a man who takes notes during meetings (!), is a sharp questioner, often displays a long attention span, was willing to alter his positions to appeal to his base, and flirted with running for political office any number of times (including governor of New York) but who always changed his mind. The authors elicit praise from those who are/were close to him, such as Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Not every interview subject, of course, has fond memories, and readers with Trump fatigue should stay away. Some contributors comment about his arrogance (taking credit for “Make America Great Again”—a slogan Ronald Reagan had used), fondness for attractive women, and thin skin. He was, for example, friendly with the Clintons until candidate Hillary seemed to blame his positions for the 2015 South Carolina church shooting. So the escalator ride down to his announcement was thoroughly planned, even inevitable. Other contributors include Katie Couric, David Cay Johnston, Glenn Beck, Ralph Nader, and Roger Stone.
A more positive view of Donald Trump than most Americans have—though the text ends with the election.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20280-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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