This generally thoughtful analysis is especially good on Trump’s “coarsening influence on political dialogue.”
A veteran Washington, D.C., reporter assesses Donald Trump’s first year as president.
“The difficulty in writing a book about what actually happened during Trump’s first year is you write in a frenzied state of dread,” says CBS News chief White House correspondent Garrett (The Enduring Revolution: How the Contract with America Continues to Shape the Nation, 2005, etc.). “What the @#%*& is next? Is what I’m writing what really matters?” The author examines the Trump phenomenon and takes an early stab at identifying 10 presidential actions likely to have a “lasting impact.” He seeks to be “credible, balanced, and nuanced,” noting both the “unadulterated love” of supporters who believe Trump “says things that need to be said” and the abhorrence of critics who find his “belligerence,” “indifference” to facts, and TV-animated consciousness make him “exhausting to the soul and corrosive to the spirit.” As Garrett writes, “Trump is recklessly authentic—a living, breathing, orangish and hair-sprayed Rorschach test of what early 21st-century America wants and expects from politics and the presidency.” The author devotes a detailed chapter to each important Trump action, including his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the travel ban, his “malicious” criticism of federal law enforcement, and his firing of FBI director James Comey. Other chapters focus on the potential of Trump’s Saudi Arabia visit to “realign” the Middle East, his failure to repeal Obamacare, the “haunting racial overtones” of separations of border-crossing families and remarks on “shithole” countries, his confronting North Korea, the elimination of 879 federal regulations, and tax reform. Billed as a disruptor, Trump is “a reliable, pliable conservative ideologue on about every issue but trade.” Garrett refuses to speculate on collusion: “I still don’t know the bottom line of the Russian story.” Some readers may be taken aback by his belief that media-hungry Trump merely “pretends to hate reporters” and his answer to the query, “is Trump a racist? No one can know but Trump.”
This generally thoughtful analysis is especially good on Trump’s “coarsening influence on political dialogue.”Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18591-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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