A hilarious and pertinent parody to help pass the time until the November election decides the nation’s fate.
Lithgow continues his poetic skewering of “a POTUS whose pants are routinely on fire.”
In this clever follow-up to Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse (2019), the actor and author unleashes more razor-sharp satirical wit, lampooning the second half of “our distractible,” Twitter-obsessed chief’s presidential term. Lithgow begins with the impeachment in late 2019 and moves through the litany of lies and blunders that have formed the Trump administration’s teetering foundation. Beyond the primary target, the author also draws farcical caricatures of fumbling politicos like senior advisers and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani (“filled with rage and babbling bluster, / ‘America’s Mayor’ has lost his luster”). Lithgow renders Mitch McConnell as a manipulative, suffocatingly partisan reptile: “By keeping his party in line and tight-knitted, / The Tortoise prevailed and got Dumpty acquitted / But by treating the trial as a legal blood sport, / He rendered the Senate a kangaroo court.” Political strategist and a man Lithgow calls the “dirty trickster, artful dodger,” Roger Stone gets a full-page poem and makes good company with another Trump blunder: “substituting his Sharpie for science” after mistracking Hurricane Dorian. The cover art and interior line drawings provide suitable graphic accompaniment to the text. As with the first volume, this one is a short, succinct, laugh-out-loud affair, and no one in the Trump administration is above Lithgow’s eagle-eyed scrutiny. Unwilling to leave even readers with limited political knowledge behind, the author also includes brief profiles of the politicians that he eviscerates. All the snarky novelty doesn’t reveal anything new nor untrue; rather, Lithgow whisks the obvious into a creatively brilliant distraction that most readers will enjoy. Even loyal Trumpers may find a stray chuckle for the ridiculousness and the current administration’s political circus.
A hilarious and pertinent parody to help pass the time until the November election decides the nation’s fate.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-79720-946-3
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Chronicle Prism
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
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