A satisfying neck-craning look at the raging dumpster fire of Trump’s final months in office.
The veteran journalist delivers an in-the-bunker account of the disastrous end of the Trump administration.
Following Fire and Fury and Siege, Wolff makes it clear that Trump is our first postmodern president, completely uninterested in doing any real work but obsessed with the media and his media image: “What was on television left a greater impression on him than what was said to him, or what intelligence he received, or what facts were known.” He surrounded himself with corrupt operators, cheerleaders, and, at the end, “crazies [who] kept identifying people who were even crazier.” In this well-paced but seldom newsworthy account of the weeks between the 2020 election and the Trump family’s anticlimactic departure on Inauguration Day, Wolff depicts a thoroughly inept, endlessly self-dealing swirl of hangers-on and sycophants whose goal was singular: to gain Machiavellian advantage while always “assuring the president that he was right.” In between the lines, the author suggests that Trump was fully aware that his retinue was loyal in order to be rewarded and was contemptuous of them all. Regarding the associate who proved perhaps the most loyal in the end, Rudy Giuliani, Wolff writes that Trump has frozen him out of his would-be shadow government at Mar-a-Lago and won’t pay any of his bills. Meanwhile, anyone with a wisp of competence was long gone before Election Day, leaving it to the likes of Sidney Powell to attempt to make Trump’s case that the election had been stolen from him and to defend him in his second impeachment. A few memorable episodes make the book worthy of attention: Trump showing patent scorn for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol at his behest or promising that he’ll be back in 2024, ready to exact vengeance on everyone who’s ever crossed him.
A satisfying neck-craning look at the raging dumpster fire of Trump’s final months in office.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-83001-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2021
IN THE NEWS
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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