A brief but still highly padded gift to true believers. Anyone else…well, here’s a scowl for you.
Trump, the Campaign Book.
America isn’t winning, writes the author; America is crippled, which makes Trump mad. You can tell because he’s scowling on the cover. His first words are, “some readers may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book is so angry and so mean looking.” Well, it’s because he “wanted a picture where I wasn’t happy,” because it wouldn’t do for him to smile when the U.S. is not winning—and say that word as Charlie Sheen would when you read, “We need a government that is committed to winning and has experience in winning.” Trump lists his qualifications in the third person: “Donald Trump builds buildings. Donald Trump develops magnificent golf courses. Donald Trump makes investments that create jobs. And Donald Trump creates jobs for legal immigrants and all Americans.” How? That’s none of your business, because if he gives you specifics, then he’ll be tipping his hand in the delicate negotiations involved in—well, winning. Thus, Trump complains, President Barack Obama loves a golf game, “but he doesn’t play with the right people.” Who should he play with? Trump’s not going to say, short of, “Believe me, I know how to use a golf course—and golf clubs—to make deals.” So Putin gets a nine iron, and we get the trophy, and all we have to do is accept Trump’s constant refrain: “Believe me….” Specifics are few, but the author’s thoughts come fast and furious all the same: Mexico will have to pay for a wall. Ronald Reagan was a nice guy, able to make us feel “so proud to be Americans.” Throw out Obamacare. And so on. By the end, if you are still unsure about Trump’s many accomplishments, make sure to wade through the 15-page (!) “About the Author” section, which begins, “Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story.”
A brief but still highly padded gift to true believers. Anyone else…well, here’s a scowl for you.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3796-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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