A highly damning portrayal unlikely to surprise any non-Trumpist reader.
Narcissism, racism, sexism, and destructiveness are among Donald Trump’s numerous pathologies.
Drawing on Trump’s tweets, interviews, speeches, The Art of the Deal, and many books and articles expounding on the president’s personality, Frank (Psychiatry/George Washington Univ. Medical Center; Obama on the Couch, 2011, etc.) concludes that Trump “is a menace to himself and his people,” completely unfit for office. The author has never met Trump, so he relies on “applied psychoanalysis,” a method, he speculates (without evidence), that has been used by Russian intelligence, revealing to them “a person who was uniquely positioned to be co-opted…by an authoritarian Putin regime.” A Klein-ian psychoanalyst, Frank blames Trump’s many psychological problems on his distant and unloving mother and his demanding father, who told Trump “that he must grow up to be a killer and a king.” Both despaired at controlling their hyperactive son, whom teachers described as “headstrong” and “surly.” A bully even at the age of 5, he threw rocks at a neighboring toddler in his playpen. Sent to the New York Military Academy after seventh grade, Trump felt banished. Frank asserts that because he was “deprived of paternal empathy as a child, Trump still yearns for a father,” which accounts for his attraction to men such as Steve Bannon and political dictators. His mother’s lack of love and attention generated feelings of humiliation and betrayal, which the author thinks are shared by his base, who feel betrayed by Washington politicians, “as they may have originally felt disappointed by their own parents years earlier. Trump instinctively recognizes their narcissistic wounds” and encourages them “to vent their rage.” As protection from the outside world, which threatens his fragile self-esteem, Trump has constructed “an internal psychological wall” within which he hones fantasies of power and paranoia. Examining Trump’s language, Frank diagnoses “a subtype of dyslexia” that leads to his difficulty understanding complexity and “simply reacting while avoiding the work of thinking.”
A highly damning portrayal unlikely to surprise any non-Trumpist reader.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2032-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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