Guardian foreign correspondent Harding (The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, 2014, etc.) offers a sneak peek at details of the “Steele dossier” that have yet to unfold—and the evidence is damning indeed.
Apart from his well-known work documenting Edward Snowden’s exposé of American intelligence, the author has logged considerable time as a reporter inside Russia. It was there that he gained firsthand information about the ways of the Putin kleptocracy that lends credence to reports proffered by British intelligence analyst Christopher Steele, who in turn has extensively documented contacts with members of the team working with Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, many of them subsequently placed inside the administration. Harding makes no bones of characterizing this as collusion, as the title of his book proclaims, and the crime committed by that collusion as treason, even if “vehemently denied, contested, and in certain key respects unprovable.” Some of those respects have since gained a broader airing with the arraignments of Paul Manafort and Carter Page, though many key players on the Russian side will be far from household names. Harding is at his best connecting dots that may not always be obvious, including Trump’s long history of business dealings with Russia and alleged connections to organized crime (“Trump’s links to the underworld were multifarious”), dealings that were often unsuccessful enough to force him into borrowing money from shady figures and cutting deals that may land him in prison before it’s all over. Among the most intriguing of the threads are Trump’s astoundingly checkered relations with a German banking giant that continued to lend him money even as the worst of credit risks—and that at the same time was laundering Russian money, “not small amounts but many billions of dollars.” If readers emerge from this fast-paced narrative convinced that the Trump White House is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian oligarchs, then there’s good reason for it.
Collusion? The Trump administration, by Harding’s account, is soaking in it. Stay tuned.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-56251-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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