A readable study in the banality of evil, even if it comes clothed in bespoke suits.
An unsparing portrait of the young architect of Trumpian nationalism.
“Stephen’s rhetoric has completely infected the tone and mantra of this administration,” says a former high school classmate of Donald Trump’s chief henchman. “It’s his.” That rhetoric, writes California-based journalist Guerrero, centers on multiculturalism, which Stephen Miller, descended from Jewish immigrants from pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, rejects in favor of white nationalism. The author charts the ambitious Miller’s rise, claiming that, at one point, he aspired to be a U.S. senator. Fresh out of college, he started working as an assistant to tea party darling Michelle Bachmann, moved on to work with a right-wing Arizona congressman, and then snagged a job with Alabama senator and erstwhile Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions, “an elfin nativist with white hair.” He eventually jumped into the White House, promoted by Steve Bannon, having been nurtured by right-wing entrepreneur David Horowitz, and forged connections with a broad range of nationalist allies, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis. By Guerrero’s account, Miller is the principal author of the administration’s immigration policy, with its tent-city prisons and separation of infants from parents. The “demonization of migrants” as criminals and people who, as Trump once said, “would never go back to their huts,” is an essential tool to keep a nationalist base galvanized and ready to fight. Trump didn’t need Miller to teach him the art of hatemongering, Guerrero writes, but all the same, Miller’s “fanatical ideology, work ethic and strategic thinking” have furthered the aims of a president bent on destroying existing norms. Guerrero sometimes shades off into idle speculation, as when she connects Miller’s California origins to Hollywood make-believe, but her account of his unsentimental education by way of racist texts, a carefully cultivated hatred for the nonwhite world, and a core group of mentors is carefully documented and persuasive.
A readable study in the banality of evil, even if it comes clothed in bespoke suits.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-298671-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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