Smart and with just the right amount of vitriol.
The onetime GOP operative traces the missteps that got us where we are.
There are wrong moves aplenty in Scaramucci’s account, both personal and societal. On the personal front, the hedge-fund whiz and Republican strategist opens by regretting his misinterpretation of the protests that accompanied the 1999 Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization, acknowledging that the protestors against free trade policies extended to China foresaw “the damage those policies would inflict on American workers.” That damage—accompanied by waging wars without levying the taxes to pay for them and bailing out Wall Street and the big corporations—has resulted in the destruction of the American working class. With that steady impoverishment has come the populist resentment that allowed someone like Donald Trump to gain office. Scaramucci was Trump’s director of communications for nine days in 2017, and a good soldier for a while after, until he realized working for him was “a huge mistake.” He writes, “Just me, I’d like to put Trump in solitary confinement. And yet I also think we need to be very careful with that kind of thing.” In a statement sure to infuriate the president if he learns of it, Scaramucci asserts, “Trump’s not as personally important as he wants to be. He’s the result of bad decisions made by others.” Apart from dissing Trump and ruing bad decisions of many kinds, however, Scaramucci offers a learned and persuasive account of how economics relates directly to the current state of affairs, albeit sometimes delivered in rhetoric worthy of Tony Soprano: “If you remove all the reasons for self-restraint, the alpha apes will come cruising in to get theirs and screw everyone else.” While showing not much love lost for the Democratic Party, Scaramucci also urges reforms that might wrest power from the “TrumpGOP,” including bans on corporate political spending and gerrymandering.
Smart and with just the right amount of vitriol.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9781250437563
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2026
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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