A modest, soft-spoken book that is sure to enrage its chief subject.
Former FBI director Comey, much in the news, reviews his career and speaks his mind about his dismissal.
“I fully intended to serve as director of the FBI through the year 2023,” writes Comey, that year being when his 10-year term, begun under Barack Obama, expired. “What, I wondered, could possibly interfere with that?” The “what” was Donald Trump, who, under investigation for various improprieties committed during his campaign and perhaps after, demanded personal loyalty of Comey and did not receive the required affirmative reply. “Holy crap, they are trying to make each of us an ‘amica nostra’—friend of ours,” he writes, adverting to time he spent pursuing Mafia figures as a federal prosecutor in New York. As has been well-reported, the author weighs Trump and his colleagues and finds them wanting in every way: “this president is unethical,” he charges, “and untethered to truth and institutional values.” That president, he adds with a touch of informed speculation, is also bound for greater legal troubles than he has faced thus far. Comey looks back on a long career marked by such signature moments as his uncovering Dick Cheney associate Scooter Libby as the person who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, a matter over which he came under considerable pressure to back off the case, one of the many “exhausting lessons in the importance of institutional loyalty over expediency and politics” that he would learn in service to three administrations. Along the way, aside from a couple of personal digs at Trump’s clothing style and hand size, Comey serves up some well-observed remarks on the qualities of a successful leader, including humor, “accurate feedback” and pushing for improvement, especially self-improvement—again, all matters in which the current occupant of the White House falls short. Not all the book will be convincing, especially to supporters of Trump’s opponent, whose campaign suffered a tremendous blow when Comey announced that she, too, was under investigation.
A modest, soft-spoken book that is sure to enrage its chief subject.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19245-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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