If you’re puzzled why the sitting president isn’t going after the Russians for election tampering and other bad behavior,...
An eye-popping exposé of what amounts to a Cabinet appointment for Vladimir Putin in the Trump White House.
The facts are being revealed daily: In one bit of fresh Trump news uncovered by Yahoo News investigative reporter Isikoff and Mother Jones Washington bureau chief Corn (co-authors: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, 2006), Russian authorities lobbied the incoming administration extensively for a Putin regime–friendly secretary of state, and voilà, Rex Tillerson was appointed. That Tillerson is out of office is just one denouement of a tale that may start with the premise, as one intelligence insider put it, that the White House is now occupied by a “Manchurian candidate.” And why might Trump be so characterized? There lies the meat of this book, a careful, piece-by-piece look at the business dealings between Russia and various tentacles of Trump’s shady business empire, including attempted spinoffs from the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow that collectively explain “Trump’s unwavering sympathy for the Russian strongman”—a sympathy that includes refusing to enforce congressionally mandated sanctions. Quite simply, write the authors, “Trump would not criticize the man whose permission he would need to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.” Tied up in what is a resounding refusal to put national interests over personal ones are a mess of related circumstances, including side notes on Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the Panama Papers; Barack Obama’s failure to act on intelligence that reported Russian infiltration of the American electoral process; an unhurried intelligence apparatus that assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win; and now, a compromised president who, for all his protestations to the contrary, seems thoroughly in the pocket of the Russian government. “Never before,” write the authors, “had a president’s election been so closely linked to the intervention of a foreign power.”
If you’re puzzled why the sitting president isn’t going after the Russians for election tampering and other bad behavior, this is just the book to explain.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2875-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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