Sets a standard for political storytelling with impeccable research and lively writing.
The work of more than 50 Washington Post journalists quilted together to create a meticulously thorough record of Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Sullivan, Jordan, and Luxenberg team up to produce the latest entry in a series of books based on the esteemed newspaper’s unparalleled coverage of Trump and his many misdeeds. In 56 chapters, beginning with “Watch Your Back” in March 2019 and moving through “Never Over” in the first months of 2020, the text includes extensive original reporting and fleshing-out of a foundation of published work and previous interviews, including that of John Bolton. The giant cast of characters is laid out in a four-page “List of Principal Figures,” and the following pieces create 3-dimensional portraits of the major ones. Nancy Pelosi is one of the strongest: We see her struggling with the pros and cons of impeachment, mourning at her friend Cokie Roberts’ funeral, and ripping up Trump’s speech about Rush Limbaugh on national TV. All through the long haul to the unhappy finish, readers can relive the many shocking moments that seem to occur every day—e.g., Donald Trump Jr.’s dismissing career Foreign Service officers as “jokers” or the manipulated video that made it look like Pelosi gave a speech while intoxicated. Regarding “Fat Jerry,” Trump’s sobriquet for Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee: “The two men shared New York accents but not much else. Trump…was born into wealth. Nadler was the son of a New Jersey chicken farmer who had moved the family to New York City after the farm had gone out of business. In politics, Nadler built a career defending the working class with a style that was more scholarly than flashy. Fighting the loud and showy developer from Queens burnished that reputation.” Including 45 pages of footnotes and an exhaustive index, the granular detail of this history makes it a gift to posterity—and to news junkies—but any reader who does not support Trump will find plenty of useful material.</p> Sets a standard for political storytelling with impeccable research and lively writing.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982152-99-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
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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