A deeply reported look at how the president who promised to “drain the swamp” has been operating from the sewer.
A report on the hush-money scandals that have threatened the presidency of Donald Trump.
Palazzolo and Rothfeld led a Wall Street Journal team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s shady payments to Stormy Daniels. The reporters tied these efforts directly to Trump and also connected that effort to an earlier deal with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year with whom Trump had relations, and an agreement with the publisher of the National Enquirer to silence her. “The Journal had little interest,” write the authors, “in a story about Trump having had consensual affairs”—his philandering was well-known—“…but hush money was indisputably newsworthy.” The authors clearly demonstrate how the stories the reporters broke had larger ramifications and continue to reverberate, as they connect through Cohen to dealings with Russia investigated as part of the Mueller Report and show that the president’s tendencies to lie and bluff and distance himself from his enablers long predate his entry into politics. This sordid tale extends from the early influence of Roy Cohn through the more recent efforts of Rudy Giuliani as Trump’s “fixer.” Yet the heart of the book is the relationship and subsequent estrangement between Trump and Cohen, who was loyal to a fault and felt his loyalty had been betrayed. The authors detail how Cohen claimed he had never requested a pardon from Trump, though he had, repeatedly; and how Cohen’s numerous gambits to enrich himself hurt his attempts to cut his prison time. Nearly everyone in this book is some sort of double dealer or worse; the narrative doesn’t pit good guys against bad guys but rather bad guys battling worse guys.
A deeply reported look at how the president who promised to “drain the swamp” has been operating from the sewer.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13239-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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