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
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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