Excellent reporting and assured writing—an ominous warning.
Another damning portrait of a disastrous administration.
“I am your retribution,” Trump promised his followers in a recent speech, since elaborated on with threats to root out “junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals, and dangerous refugees that no other country wants.” As ABC News chief Washington correspondent Karl writes, none other than Steve Bannon himself pointed out to him that retribution was a code word employed by Confederate agents in a plot to assassinate Lincoln. Trump may be undisciplined and often unhinged, but he tells you who he is and what he means: The promised concentration camps for undocumented immigrants are likely not metaphors. After the 2020 election, Karl reveals, an irate, ego-deflated Trump threatened to leave the GOP and form his own party. He was dissuaded from doing so not by RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s pleas for party loyalty, but instead by her threat of withdrawing millions of dollars in funding from him. Karl rightfully asks, Why not let the “wounded, vindictive, and angry former president” go? After all, as many GOP insiders have said behind closed doors, Trump is a loser. With him, the GOP has lost two midterms and a presidential election, and it’s demonstrable that non-Trump GOP candidates won in 2022 while pro-Trumpers lost. Still, Karl notes, Trump has a stranglehold on the GOP, so much so that “there may be no quicker way to lose a 2024 Republican presidential primary than to admit you’d consider trying to oust Donald Trump from office.” Just ask Liz Cheney. Other intriguing nuggets from this news-packed and newsworthy book: Trump fell full tilt under the sway of a QAnon theory that he’d be reinstated as president by a court decision, and, “more detached from reality than ever,” he now views the Jan. 6 rioters as heroes.
Excellent reporting and assured writing—an ominous warning.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593473986
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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
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