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
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
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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