Bilious, querulous, and preposterous: everything a Trumpian apologia is meant to be, suited for true believers alone.
The grand champion of “alternative facts” defends her years as one of Donald Trump’s primary enablers.
Conway was infamous as a Trump spokesperson for a range of emotions that ran from contempt to rage, and she had a knack for contemptuously shrugging off every excess committed by her boss and his gang. This memoir demonstrates all of that and more. Snarky from the get-go—“By every imaginable metric, I should have been a Democrat….Probably a man-hater, too”—she writes with abundant self-congratulation about having risen above her blue-collar past to embark upon “the wildest adventure of my life,” namely tossing out alternative facts while attempting to explain away the many misdeeds of the Trump White House. Unsurprisingly given her track record, Conway has plenty of venom to go around: She despises Steve Bannon (“No one…did less work—less actual work—while he was there”), Paul Manafort (“He literally fell asleep during my PowerPoint on how to close the gender gap with Hillary”), and Jared Kushner (“He misread the Constitution in one crucial respect, thinking that all power not given to the federal government was reserved to him”). Her undisguised rage lands hardest on her husband, George Conway, an erstwhile Trump supporter who began to tweet, a couple of years in, anti-Trump views that she took personally—without, it appears, ever considering that Trump was manifestly unqualified for the job. On her offending husband, the author has dark thoughts aplenty: “Democracy will survive. America will survive. George and I may not survive.” Of course, she has plenty of jabs for Joe Biden and other Democrats. As for Trump, it’s nothing but a lovefest: His people may have led him astray, she growls, but “he always put America first.”
Bilious, querulous, and preposterous: everything a Trumpian apologia is meant to be, suited for true believers alone.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982187-34-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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