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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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