A concise and dispassionate analysis of the controversial president’s performance over the year since his unexpected...
This academic publication from the publisher’s First Year Project won’t generate the bombshell headlines of more sensationalist and gossipy books, but it provides context and balance for its conclusions, ones that are consistently at odds with Trump’s own assessment of his performance.
Nelson (Political Science/Rhodes Coll.; Resilient America: Electing Nixon, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government, 2014, etc.) compares Trump’s first year with the first years of other presidents, generally better versed in the ways of governing, and he concludes that “the most powerful office in the world is not an entry-level government job.” The author shows how the electorate was primed to support the celebrity outsider, seeing his lack of experience and connections as strengths rather than weaknesses. He also shows how the president’s lack of support within government circles, even within his own party, left him bereft when it came time to fill his Cabinet and make other crucial appointments and how his unpredictable temperament left him particularly unsuited for establishing policy. Instead, he “wasted much of the ten-week transition period, tossing aside the months of planning and research his team had done.” He frequently found himself making appointments to replace other appointments he had made, relying heavily on his vice president for recommendations because there were so few he knew and trusted that had the necessary experience. He vowed to stop tweeting once the candidate became president, and then continued anyway. He criticized his predecessor for overuse of the executive order and then issued a slew of them. His polarizing campaign never transitioned to unity once he became elected. “He displayed virtually no knowledge of history,” writes the author, and no understanding of the separation of power among branches of government or how to build coalitions to govern effectively. Most presidents improve at the job once they gain experience with it, but this analysis sees little reason for hope.
A concise and dispassionate analysis of the controversial president’s performance over the year since his unexpected election win.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8139-4144-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2018
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
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
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