A nimble overview of the library of Trumpiana, which is likely to grow no matter what the outcome of the 2020 election.
A literary survey of the wreckage that is the Trump administration.
In 2015, Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post book critic Lozada carved out a special assignment: reading the books generated by the Trump White House years (and some earlier books, such as The Art of the Deal) to create an intellectual history of the era. “I’ve read some 150 of them thus far, and even that is just a fraction of the Trump canon,” he writes. “One of the ironies of our time is that a man who rarely reads, preferring the rage of cable news and Twitter for hours each day, has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency.” The author serves up a readers’ guide to a literature that is ever growing—and that will grow further with future memoirs (“Don McGahn, Robert Mueller, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Anthony Fauci rank highest on my wish list”). Some of the books are “insufferable” while others are essential. Lozada lists the top dozen at the end of his meta-analysis, one of them the Mueller Report. Some of the books are less about Trump than about the culture that produced him—e.g., J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Jennifer Silva’s We’re Still Here, and Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness. By Lozada’s account, Hillbilly Elegy is less important than Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash. There are books of worship and clubby belonging (“most Trump sycophants do not even pretend that Trump should be—or wants to be—a leader for all Americans"), books of qualified demerit (Mueller), books by apostates such as David Frum (who writes that Trump’s refusal to take any responsibility for the pandemic is “likely to be history’s epitaph on his presidency”), books by worshippers like Newt Gingrich, and, of course, books by Trump’s ghostwriters.
A nimble overview of the library of Trumpiana, which is likely to grow no matter what the outcome of the 2020 election.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982145-62-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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