A painstaking documentation of a relentless culture of corruption.
A wide-ranging exposé of “the crashing of norms and laws and the mixing of family and business that is the Trump administration.”
Unlike many other mainstream journalists, Peabody-winning Trump, Inc. podcast host Bernstein, who has been digging into the Trump and Kushner family businesses for years, never hesitates to label Donald Trump a liar, a perjurer, and a felon who has escaped imprisonment for his numerous business crimes. (The author pays little attention to the multiple accusations against Trump as a serial sexual assaulter, which have been reported in depth elsewhere.) Bernstein documents how much of her scathing critique of the current president also applies to Trump’s father, his two adult sons, and his daughter, Ivanka, who linked the Trumps to the Kushner clan through her 2009 marriage to Jared Kushner. According to Bernstein’s carefully documented research, Jared has morphed from a mostly upright, nonpolitical New Jersey real estate developer into a right-wing tyrant and congenital liar. Already well known before this book was the criminal conviction of Jared Kushner’s father for business fraud, but Bernstein provides useful added detail regarding the Kushners’ many misdeeds. She also sticks to the facts and avoids partisan politics: After all, for most of their lives, members of the Trump and Kushner clans identified more as Democrats than Republicans, though they gave campaign contributions to politicians of all ideologies while trying to buy influence that would benefit their real estate empires. Of all the characters Bernstein exposes in this necessarily hard-hitting book, Ivanka is the only one who comes across as willing to rise to power through honest work rather than just her family name. The author, who conducted hundreds of interviews and read more than 100,000 documents to create this damning portrait of two clearly unscrupulous families, credits investigative journalists before her, especially Wayne Barrett, whose 1992 Trump biography exposed his decades of nefarious business and personal dealings.
A painstaking documentation of a relentless culture of corruption.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00187-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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