A thoughtful account of covering what the author rightly calls “the most unlikely, exciting, ugly, trying, and all-around...
One of Donald Trump’s favorite media targets tells how she attained that distinction in this spry look at the 2016 campaign.
NBC News correspondent Tur covered the presidential campaign from the very start, with Trump in her sights for more than 500 grueling days. At the beginning, she writes, she informed the disbelieving hosts of Today that, even after Trump’s opening remark that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he was polling strongly in bellwether New Hampshire. “Trump wasn’t part of anyone’s plan,” she writes, adding, “for that matter, neither was I.” However, Trump managed to tap into a deep well of resentment and anger among disaffected voters who were content to trade in old notions of truth and decency for Trump’s wild ride. Trump’s own encounters with Tur were just as resentful and angry: he complained that she wouldn’t look at him and was distorting words she was quoting verbatim, and she had a special knack for upsetting him. “His rage didn’t register in the moment,” she writes in a post-mortem of an early encounter. “I thought it was all part of his shtick. The reality show star. But watching his face on-screen, it’s clear Trump isn’t playing.” Still, praise came from the author’s colleagues, and even, on occasion, from Trump himself, who grudgingly allowed that Tur was better than most reporters. In Tennessee, “he tried to introduce me to a crowd…a hand on my shoulder like I was his wife.” Trump’s anger, page after page of it, is discomfiting, and Tur’s reactions to it seem to verge on symptoms of PTSD. Even so, her own back-of-the-envelope analyses are borne out by subsequent events, as when she writes, “Trump is crude, and in his halo of crudeness other people get to be crude as well.”
A thoughtful account of covering what the author rightly calls “the most unlikely, exciting, ugly, trying, and all-around bizarre campaign in American history.”Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-268492-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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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