Middling, but readers who can’t get enough dirt on Trump and associates will revel in it.
A dishy takedown of the mediocrities, charlatans, and grifters populating the corridors of power in D.C.
A trigger warning that there’s naughty language ahead: As Daily Beast investigative reporters Markay and Suebsaeng write, they wanted to call their book Another Shitstorm in Fucktown: The Donald J. Trump Odyssey. Though the powers that be at their agency and publisher said no—think of the Costco and Walmart sales forgone—the authors allow that “we thought it felt like the only title that fully captured the essence of what the Trump era was really like.” There are plenty of people in the capital who won’t talk to the duo: the lieutenants and foot soldiers who enable the current occupant of the White House, men and women whom they refer to as “Trumpworld’s Henry Hills.” The reference, of course, is to the Mafia hit man who served the Lucchese crime family and inspired the film Goodfellas. While the authors aver that their sights are on those loyalists, they can’t keep their eyes off the prize, Trump himself, with his addled visions of being beloved by the show business figures in whose ranks he thinks he belongs. There’s lots of gossipy stuff here that readers may not have found in other sources—e.g., that a game designer sued Trump for ripping off a Monopoly-ish board game or that Trump used to litter the floor of the Apprentice studio with sucked-on Tic Tacs for the sheer joy of knowing that some peon had to clean up after him. The big picture isn’t much different from books such as Bob Woodward’s Fear and David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse Than You Think, but Markay and Suebsaeng are so breathless that it’s like reading Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon after a healthy diet of Peter Biskind and David Thomson.
Middling, but readers who can’t get enough dirt on Trump and associates will revel in it.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984878-56-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2020
IN THE NEWS
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.
The veteran Washington Post columnist and TV commentator offers a richly documented history of and argument for a wider embrace of conservative political values.
“Richly documented” is an understatement. Will (A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, 2014, etc.) is nothing if not a thorough, dedicated researcher and thinker, but he’s often prolix. Many of the historical figures the author references will come as no surprise—e.g., Burke, Moynihan, Madison, Locke—and there are also plenty from the literary world; these include allusions to Twain and Fitzgerald, whose closing sentences from The Great Gatsby provide Will with a metaphor for his principal points. Not much the Pulitzer winner offers here will surprise those who have paid attention to his rhetoric over the decades. His three American heroes remain: Washington, Lincoln, John Marshall. He thinks the U.S. government has grown too big, that it is too interested in providing entitlements (Will is a believer in much more self-reliance than he sees evident today), that schools and universities should do a much more rigorous job of transmitting the Western historical heritage, and that progressives just don’t understand how America is supposed to work. However, in one chapter, he may surprise some readers: He declares he is an atheist (though “amiable, low-voltage”), and he spends a few pages reminding us that the founders were not particularly religious and that we must observe the separation of church and state. He praises the civil rights movement but asserts that much of it has gone wrong. Oddly missing are direct references to the current occupant of the White House, though Will does zing many of his predecessors (from both parties but principally Democrats), mostly for their failure to comprehend fully the concept of liberty that fueled the founders.
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48093-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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