A journalist unearths information revealing that the president is even more dangerous than previously thought.
A new standard in presidential recklessness.
Other reporters beat this respected ABC newsman to press, but the scoops in his 2024 campaign book were worth the wait. Though last fall’s election results prevented a special counsel investigating Donald Trump from showing his findings in court, Karl’s reporting fills in some blanks. He presents previously unpublished handwritten notes by Mike Pence that describe Trump’s rash behavior on January 6, 2021; details on how Trump “spent most of the afternoon—scrolling through Twitter—as his supporters attacked the Capitol”; and statements that a top Trump staffer, “shocked” by his handling of secret documents, made to prosecutors. Facing this opponent, Democrats found time to accuse one another of subterfuge. Remember Joe Biden’s July 2024 letter telling Democrats to quit trying to oust him as the nominee? “I don’t think he wrote it,” Nancy Pelosi tells Karl. And count Hunter Biden among those who “believed Barack Obama was somehow behind” George Clooney’s op-ed asking Biden to bow out. Striving for “a definitive account,” Karl revisits risible episodes (Whither “childless cat ladies”?) and all-caps social media rage that some readers might rather forget. But there’s a silver lining: It all could have been much worse. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, tells Karl that if he hadn’t been imprisoned for contempt of Congress when a would-be assassin shot at Trump, he would’ve tried to incite unrest by “throwing fucking gasoline on” the smoldering tension. And yet, Karl reminds us, Trump has said he wouldn’t mind the murder of reporters, and in his second term he’s a potentially “more consequential, more radical” president, attacking his enemies, courts, anti-corruption laws, and aid programs. Maybe he won’t “topple American democracy, but he has shown how it can be done.” Karl’s warning stands atop powerful evidence.
A journalist unearths information revealing that the president is even more dangerous than previously thought.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798217047000
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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