A damning study of Trump’s mind that goes a long way toward explaining some damnably odd behavior.
When the CIA’s former lead shrink starts examining your head, a person might suspect that there’s trouble afoot.
There’s a long-standing principle in psychiatry that a doctor should not venture an analysis—a public profile, more formally—of someone without that person’s consent and without having made an in-person assessment. “The ethical principle seemed extreme and overdrawn,” writes Post (Narcissism and Politics, 2014, etc.) in light of the fact that other academicians, including psychologists and political scientists, regularly deliver opinions about the mind of Donald Trump. Forgive him the professional transgression, for what the author has to say is of pressing interest and helps elucidate much of Trump’s eccentric behavior. At the heart of the narrative is a portrait of the mental makeup of the narcissist, coupled with the mass psychology of a crowd of supporters who are locked into near worship of a charismatic leader. That charisma may not always be a bad thing; Post, for instance, attributes to it the success of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. But the narcissism component is seldom positive, and it explains many things about Trump. “The only loyalty a person with his malignant or pathological narcissism has is to himself and his own survival,” Post writes, and never mind the fate of those around that person, since loyalty flows only in the direction of Trump and not the other way. Paranoia, insecurity, bluster, constant aggression, and utter lack of empathy are other components of the template. Worse news comes at the end of this complex but unflagging account when he ponders the possibility that this will all end not with a whimper but a bang, either through the nuclear war that Trump has long feared or the refusal to relinquish office if defeated in 2020, since “the loss of the limelight which has been such a rewarding accompaniment of the presidential role will be very difficult for him to tolerate.”
A damning study of Trump’s mind that goes a long way toward explaining some damnably odd behavior.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-218-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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