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TRUMP ON THE COUCH

Name: TRUMP ON THE COUCH
Author: Justin A. Frank
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2032-4

INSIDE THE MIND OF THE PRESIDENT

by Justin A. Frank ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018

A highly damning portrayal unlikely to surprise any non-Trumpist reader.

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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

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)