An eye-opening look at how bad leaders—one in particular—rely on bad followers.
A pointed, dispiriting examination of the rings of supporters who surrounded Donald Trump and abetted his countless misdeeds.
The Germans of the Third Reich are the textbook case of those who “were only following orders,” writes Kellerman, who was the founding executive director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. Hitler could not have carried out his horrific campaigns without layers of willing enablers—“followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive.” Though the author notes that Trump was no Hitler, he was undoubtedly a destructive, feckless, and ultimately failed leader. Kellerman examines the circles of powerful men and women who surrounded Trump by virtue of professing loyalty to him, a requirement for access—along with physical attractiveness, Kellerman adds, in the case of inner-inner circle members such as Ivanka Trump and Hope Hicks. With that loyalty came the fervent suspension of disbelief and surrender to the lies and fear by which Trump wielded power. Kellerman goes on to examine Trump’s base, made up of segments of the electorate who shared in common Whiteness and fear of losing what can only be described as White privilege—even though so many of its members are far from privileged. Most provocatively, the author delivers a scathing critical exam of the people who assisted Trump as he blundered his way through the pandemic. One who receives praise is Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who realized he was being played at the famous Bible-in-front-of-the-church episode and who “made as loud and clear as he could without crossing the line into insubordination that he viewed Trump’s leadership as deeply if not fatally flawed.” And one who comes in for close questioning is Anthony Fauci, who, Kellerman suggests, did harm by not “being more direct, less circumspect, less political.”
An eye-opening look at how bad leaders—one in particular—rely on bad followers.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-108-83832-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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