A foregone conclusion: fans of Trump will want to turn to The Art of the Deal, while his detractors will find plenty of...
The man who would be king—pardon, president—comes in for unsparing scrutiny and is found wanting.
“I don’t care if she’s sweet. Is she hot?” Thus Donald Trump, inspecting would-be Miss Universes as a general would an elite guard. Trump may have built an unknown fortune in hotels, casinos, and luxury apartments, but he is foremost both a media creation and a creator of media images. That self-creation has propelled him to the front ranks of the Republican Party in an odd trajectory whose launch dates back decades. The apex of that arc, though, may well have been The Apprentice, the TV show that made ever more fuzzy the “line between Trump the character and Trump the person,” a line that until recently allowed him to say whatever he wanted to, and always with the defense that “things he said on TV were intended just to provoke or entertain.” Things are more serious now. Washington Post journalists Kranish (Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War, 2010, etc.) and Fisher (Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation, 2007, etc.) are careful to number among the fortunes of that show its contribution to Trump’s blue-collar credibility and conquest of at least a segment of Middle America. This is a chronicle of successes and astonishingly shrewd manipulations but also of missteps; not much will be breaking news, but everything here reinforces David Cay Johnston’s newly released Making of Donald Trump. Because the authors are connected to a publication on whom Trump has lost no love and vice versa, partisans of the subject will almost certainly dismiss this as liberal media stunt. Yet those willing and brave enough to dare these pages will find the authors’ approach evenhanded, perhaps even overly so, in preference to allowing Trump plenty of rope—and suffice it to say that Trump unrolls miles of it.
A foregone conclusion: fans of Trump will want to turn to The Art of the Deal, while his detractors will find plenty of ammunition here for their cause.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5577-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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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