A dispiriting, often sordid, page-turner.
Yet more clear evidence of a highly dysfunctional administration.
Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, 2018, etc.), who admits a “train-wreck fascination with Trump,” begins the new installment of his gossip-filled exposé in February 2018, as Trump embarks on his second year. Anticipating questions about his often inflammatory assertions, the author writes that he has provided anonymity to sources who requested it and tried to confirm information with multiple sources, but he still expects some individuals—as they did in response to his previous book—to “disavow the truth they have told.” One, though, “stood by his remarks in Fire and Fury without complaint, quibble, or hurt feelings”: Steve Bannon, who Wolff claims is “the most clear-eyed interpreter of the Trump phenomenon I know.” Although Bannon left the administration in 2017, the author portrays him as a master manipulator with wide-ranging connections, “the best soldier in Trump’s army” during the midterm campaigns; the “primary purveyor of the caravan narrative” that Trump brought out to fire up his base, with direct influence on Sean Hannity, Trump’s confidant. In fact, Wolff reports, Bannon saw himself heading a presidential ticket with Hannity in 2020. The author solicits Bannon’s views on everything, including Robert Mueller, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort; Trump’s performance abroad, including the humiliating aftermath of his meeting with Putin; the choice of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court; Ivanka and Jared, whom Bannon disparages as “grifters”; and Nikki Haley’s decision to leave her post as U.N. ambassador, which Bannon deems “a precursor to the party’s loss of just about everyone with an education.” Overall, the author presents a portrait of the president that will come as no surprise to readers. Trump is ignorant of how government works, “incapable of admitting vulnerability,” a “compulsive, persistent” liar, easily distracted, and unable to absorb information from briefings. Wolff’s dismal report confirms the assessment that the Trump world contains “the greatest concentration of ignominious lowlifes, scammers, and con artists ever seen in national politics.”
A dispiriting, often sordid, page-turner.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-25382-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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