An entertainment, though not much more to ordinary readers. Aspiring politicos and their staffers, though, will want this...
A semigonzo, often funny, occasionally revealing look at the daily business of conducting a presidential campaign.
It’s not quite Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 or The Boys on the Bus, but Rolling Stone contributing editor Hastings owes something more than just inspiration to Hunter Thompson and Timothy Crouse. Or perhaps it’s in the nature of the beast: Every campaign needs a boozing, ill-kempt, confrontational goat, and Hastings is just right for the part. On one instance where candidate Barack Obama is about to wade into a crowd of reporters for a friendly off-the-record beer, for instance, Hastings recalls a Washington Post writer sidling up to him, eyeballing his shorts and T-shirt and saying, “You might want to, you know, put on something nicer.” Well-dressed or not, Hastings knows how to ask hard questions, for which reason he was often shunted from top-tier accommodations to barely on the bus, much less the campaign plane—not at the president’s behest, mind you, but at the hands of ticked-off staffers, from the high-ranking (David Plouffe et al.) to the barely out of high school. Hastings dishes dirt, little of it deeply scandalous; his title, it seems, comes from the fact that every perceived swing in mood, every gaffe, every poor moment at the microphone set those staffers on edge. And not just the Dems: Hastings matches the endless moments of terror with moments of elation when Mitt Romney stuck silver foot in mouth. One payoff: Though Hastings did in fact agree to go off the record at points, that doesn’t keep him from reporting on his fellow reporters.
An entertainment, though not much more to ordinary readers. Aspiring politicos and their staffers, though, will want this for its astute look at the tricks of the trade.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 9781101600894
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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