Behind the scenes and ripped from the headlines, Green’s saga exuberantly traces Trump’s wild ride to the presidency.
How a radical conservative with “cult-leader magnetism” became a powerful political force.
When Green (co-author: Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, 2013) first met Steve Bannon in 2011, he “quickly sized him up as a colorful version of a recognizable Washington character type: the political grifter seeking to profit from the latest trend.” An investigative reporter, former senior editor of the Atlantic, and weekly political columnist for the Boston Globe, Green spent the next several years immersed in right-wing politics, resulting in a profile of Bannon for Bloomberg Businessweek, where Green is now senior national correspondent. Drawing on his own articles, as well as interviews and abundant media coverage, the author fashions a vivid, fast-paced narrative about the people and events that culminated in “the greatest political upset in modern American history,” which even the politically astute Green did not see coming. How did this happen? is the question that drives the book. A crucial piece of the puzzle, writes the author, is Bannon, “a brilliant ideologue” and “opportunistic businessman” who, before meeting Trump, had focused his “populist-nationalist ideas” on supporting Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and on destroying Hillary Clinton. After seven years in the Navy, Bannon, “intoxicated by the go-go Reagan eighties,” set his sights on Wall Street. He got into Harvard Business School, where his working-class roots set him apart from his well-heeled classmates. He excelled academically and was hired by Goldman Sachs, eventually leaving to dabble “in minor Hollywood moguldom,” followed by a stint at a Hong Kong video game company. Back in Los Angeles, he met Andrew Breitbart, who became his guru. Green adroitly portrays many other players in the tumultuous 2016 campaign: Robert Mercer, who “resembled the bloodless capitalist hero in an Ayn Rand novel,” and his savvy daughter Rebekah, who convinced Trump to hire Bannon and Kellyanne Conway; Paul Manafort; Chris Christie; and a cadre of people working to bring down Hillary Clinton.
Behind the scenes and ripped from the headlines, Green’s saga exuberantly traces Trump’s wild ride to the presidency.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2502-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2017
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
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