No surprises for followers of the news but an ominous warning about the future.
A look at the madness that pervades the Oval Office.
CNN co-anchor and correspondent Sciutto offers a sweeping assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency, focused on the president’s erratic, baffling leadership style, which he dubs the “Madman Theory.” “By numerous accounts,” writes the author, “President Trump as commander in chief is self-confident, impulsive, and skeptical of official advice,” foreign allies, and career diplomats. He is willing to ignore information, contradict and defy advisers, and he believes that he alone knows best. To fuel his analysis, Sciutto draws on media coverage, conversations with administration officials, and interviews with Mick Mulroy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East; Susan Gordon, the country’s “second-highest-ranking intelligence official”; Fiona Hill, former European and Russian affairs director on the National Security Council; Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser; Joseph Yun, special representative for North Korea policy; and Steve Bannon. Emerging from many sources is a portrait of “a former businessman applying the lessons and rules of the New York real estate market to world affairs and in the process jettisoning a values basis for US foreign policy.” For some, such as Navarro, Trump’s pragmatism is an asset. Others vehemently disagree. “Depending on whom you ask,” Sciutto writes, “Trump the ‘madman’ is either a danger or a secret weapon, brilliant or incompetent, a ‘madman’ by choice to gain advantage in negotiations, or a ‘madman’ by accident who overestimates his own abilities and undermines the interests and safety of the nation.” After examining Trump’s handling of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Ukraine, and COVID-19, Sciutto agrees with those who characterize Trump’s approach to the world and to the presidency as “minimize, politicize, personalize, demonize the experts, and rarely strategize.” The coronavirus, Sciutto concludes, “may be the crisis that finally exposed the emptiness at the core of ‘America First.’ ”
No surprises for followers of the news but an ominous warning about the future.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-300568-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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