A decade on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton.
Journalists, especially political journalists, are not supposed to fall in love with their subjects. Chozick, who has covered politics for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, has a simple explanation: “Usually by the final stretch, candidate reporters are so brainwashed from living in the bubble that we all believe our horse will win even if the facts say otherwise.” The picture did not resolve until Election Day, but the signs were there: Clinton, whom Chozick covered for years and clearly admires, if critically, never quite got the “common person” meme, the one that allowed Donald Trump to “lick his fingers after eating a bucket of greasy KFC on board his 757 and maintain the aura of the workingman” while portraying Clinton as detached and aloof. As the author writes, there was something to that: For many reasons, Clinton disdained the press, especially the Times, and it took great efforts on the parts of her handlers—who here bear sobriquets like Brown Loafers, Policy Guy, Hired Gun, and Outsider Guy—to get Clinton anywhere near a reporter if she could help it. Chozick’s narrative, stretching over Clinton’s two campaigns, is, like the campaigns themselves, a blend of the fraught and the bland: too many buffets and too much alcohol here, breaking news and critical moments there. One sharp-edged portrait of the candidate comes when Bernie Sanders begins to pummel her in the primaries. “Hillary became sullen….She is pouty,” writes the author, “and aggrieved but not surprised that the media hadn’t given her rightful due.” Still, Chozick closes on a note of admiration for her difficult quarry, “the Hillary who tried to hold it all together—her marriage, her daughter, her career, her gender, her country.”
Entertaining and informative reading for politics junkies, though not as meaty as Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, reporting on the other side.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-241359-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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