High-level gossip of a kind, but a well-sourced, train wreck–fascinating look at the makings of Clan Trump, “so uniquely...
“Don’t. Trust. Anyone. Ever.”—X-ray meets psychoanalysis and balance sheet in this sharp-edged look at the workings of America’s most dysfunctional gang.
When your father is angry, absent, and egomaniacal, it stands to reason that you might turn out a little different from other people—and especially if you throw a lot of money into the equation. So it is, writes Vanity Fair senior reporter and former White House intern Fox, that the Trump family, formed of wives and ex-wives and mistresses and their various offspring, has emerged, with the patriarch’s peculiar brand of tutelary wisdom: Don’t ever trust anyone, even if that anyone is a member of your own family. In one small but telling passage, Trump asks a confidant what to do with two sons of such divergent abilities as Don Jr. and Eric; when told that he should give the smarter all the challenges he could come up with and the less smart all the challenges he could handle, the answer came back that it was a nice idea, less nice in practice, “because they figure out that’s what you’re doing.” By Fox’s account, the most real-worldly of the sons is Don Jr., who carved his own course for at least a time, even if he morphed into “a yapping attack puppy, trailing wherever he went the senior attack dog with the much bigger bark.” Canine metaphors aside, Melania comes in for the tiniest amount of sympathy, and perhaps Ivanka too, though a juicy bit of dish comes with the author’s account of the zeitgeist-innocent first daughter’s ill-conceived and certainly ill-delivered homily to working women, a failure that, one publishing executive says, "was a bloodbath.”
High-level gossip of a kind, but a well-sourced, train wreck–fascinating look at the makings of Clan Trump, “so uniquely suited for the second decade of the twenty-first century and its fame-obsessed, money-hungry, voracious twenty-four-hour cycle of a culture.”Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-269077-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2018
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 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
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