Preaching to the choir? Yes, but it’s a sermon that seemingly requires constant reiteration.
A depressingly cogent litany of the current president’s unbelievably spectacular failures.
Following his recent memoir, From the Left, longtime journalist Press, host of an eponymous show and former host of Crossfire, lays into Donald Trump and the “chaos and corruption [that] have become our new normal.” To be sure, the author could have likely extended this book out another couple hundred reasons, but the portrait on offer here is ugly enough as it is. Divided into sections such as “Trump’s Disastrous Acts as President,” “Trump Fans the Flames of Racism,” and “Trump’s Impeachable Offenses,” the book is a solid resource for the millions of Americans attempting to keep track of the near-daily lies and half-baked Twitter tirades. Press ably limns his subject’s myriad faults—pathological lying (“whatever demonstrable falsehood bubbles up to the surface of his brain is always, for him, the right thing to say at that moment”), laziness, racism, sexism, rampant xenophobia, obsession with Hillary Clinton, addiction to Fox News, inability to understand even the most basic elements of governance—and unprecedented attacks on some of the most important institutions in the U.S., including health care, the media, an open internet, and the social safety net. The author also delves into “Trump’s Cabinet of Thieves,” a who’s who of corruption and incompetence: They’re all here, from Scott Pruitt to Ryan Zinke to Rick Perry to Betsy DeVos. Trump devotees and hard-right Republicans will no doubt find fault with the book—or not read it—but Press is beyond reproach in his research and documentation. And as for that single reason for Trump to stay? You guessed it: Vice President Mike Pence, who “would be even more dangerous” as president. As the author writes, “he’s even more conservative than Trump—former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren calls him ‘as far right as you could go without falling off the earth”—and a lot more effective.”
Preaching to the choir? Yes, but it’s a sermon that seemingly requires constant reiteration.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30647-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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