Evenhandedly, McCabe assures readers that the threat of the title will not prevail thanks to the rule of law, even if Trump...
In a news-making memoir, former FBI head McCabe recounts his interactions with a corrupt government—our own—that uses “the power of public office to undermine legal authority and to denigrate law enforcement.”
Early on, the author reproduces his 1995 FBI employment application, which cites an arrest for purchasing alcohol with a fake ID and calls him an average student in law school, if one with “a strong interest in criminal law.” That much is abundantly clear, as he recounts how he secured a post with the FBI, “the nemesis of criminals.” It is also clear on which side McCabe’s loyalties lie. After Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey in an “improvised and slapdash” travesty, he installed McCabe as acting director—and then fired him, too, just shy of his being able to retire with a pension. (A lawsuit is pending.) Throughout the book, newsworthy moments come fast and furious: Trump is frenetic and angry, and his style and signaling fuel “a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development.” He is vindictive, insecure, and corrupt. More than once, he demanded to know who McCabe voted for. He governs by tweet and insult: As the author stalwartly notes of tweets directed to him, “it is meaningless to be called a liar by the most prolific liar I have ever encountered.” More to the point, and now corroborative more than newsbreaking, is McCabe’s matter-of-fact assurance that Russia interfered in the U.S. election in ways that put Trump in office. No matter the degree of collusion on the American side, Trump has consistently sided with Russia against the American intelligence community. “He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch [intercontinental] missiles,” writes the author. “He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so."
Evenhandedly, McCabe assures readers that the threat of the title will not prevail thanks to the rule of law, even if Trump is doing all he can to destroy it. Somber, urgent, necessary reading for anyone paying attention.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20757-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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