Red meat for Trump foes and a convincing denunciation of the Republicans’ “win-at-all-costs electoral strategies.”
Fusion GPS founders Simpson and Fritsch enumerate the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors that put Donald Trump in the White House.
It’s clear early on that Fusion GPS, the Washington research and analysis firm headed by former Wall Street Journal staffers Simpson and Fritsch, set itself in opposition to Trump’s run for the presidency. “Many of his traits disqualified him for the job,” they write, “and his political rhetoric was loathsome, but his ties to the criminal underworld, his reliance on hidden flows of Russian money, and his record of chicanery in business topped the list.” Surprisingly, this opposition research was initially funded by a wealthy Republican who was appalled at the prospect of a Trump White House. The Steele dossier soon followed, delivered by a British intelligence agent whose allegations helped limn Trump’s ties to organized crime (including a cabal of Russians allied with the old-school Mafia) as well as financial misdeeds, various scams (Trump University, anyone?), and, most damning of all, willing collusion with Russia in interfering with the 2016 election. The authors carefully lay out their evidence, including charges that are only now coming to light, such as the involvement of Republican Congressman Devin Nunes in many of the proceedings as well as fundraising junkets to places such as Boston and Las Vegas, well outside his California district, “during which Nunes spent more than $130,000 on high-end hotels, meals, and NBA tickets, at the expense of his campaign committees.” Along the way, Simpson and Fritsch, who do not disguise their scorn for Trump and company, explore such milestones as the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Jr. and various Russian enterprises, which they hold might have been a “chicken feed” operation on the part of Russian intelligence. They also explore some of the flaws in the still-unfolding investigations into Trump, from Robert Mueller’s reticence to James Comey’s apparent incompetence.
Red meat for Trump foes and a convincing denunciation of the Republicans’ “win-at-all-costs electoral strategies.”Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13415-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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