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FIRE AND FURY

INSIDE THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE

The White House has naturally denied and decried Wolff’s account, but even if it’s only halfway accurate, it presents an...

Headline-grabbing fly-on-the-wall view of the dysfunctional playroom that is the Trump White House.

“What is this ‘white trash’?” asks a fashion model of Donald Trump. He replies, “They’re people just like me, only they’re poor.” There’s a certain Snopes-comes-to-the-big-city feel to celebrity journalist Wolff’s (Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age, 2015, etc.) tawdry portrait of the current occupants of the White House, which, writes the author, is based on conversations with the president and his senior staff and backed by hundreds of hours of recordings. Given the many competing fiefdoms in the West Wing, Wolff adds, no one wholly endorsed his access (“the president himself encouraged this idea,” he says), but no one quite said no, either. The results are damning, those competing fiefdoms not just jealous of their turf, but also vicious in their characterizations of the other side. Most aggressively nasty, by the author’s account, is former assistant Steve Bannon, who describes Trump as “a simple machine” with a binary of flattery and calumny, while he declares that “I am the leader of the national-populist movement” and suggests that Trumpism can do fine without its namesake—who, he adds, will not be around for a second term. Wolff has plenty of sting himself. Of one-time intern-turned–power broker Stephen Miller, he sneers, “he was supposed to be the house intellectual but was militantly unread,” while he suggests that the dumb-as-a-brick (Bannon’s characterization) Ivanka’s relationship with her father is purely transactional: “It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House—it was all business.” No one in the administration seems up to the job he or she is supposed to be doing, and there’s an ugly, startling instance of incompetence on every page.

The White House has naturally denied and decried Wolff’s account, but even if it’s only halfway accurate, it presents an appalling view of a frighteningly unqualified and unprepared gang that can’t think straight.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-15806-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2018

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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