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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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