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
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
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
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