A sordid family and journalistic history.
A mogul's downward spiral.
Journalist Wolff, author of a spate of books skewering the dysfunctional Trump presidency, returns to his investigation of the Murdochs with a fast-paced, gossip-filled recounting of family drama—rivaling Succession in intrigue and bitter strife—and the travails and scandals that have roiled Fox News. In focusing on the media giant, though, the author is concerned “less about what is on the air, than what is in its heart, or churning in its stomach. Here is a television story of ego, money, power, and the unnatural obsession to be on the air.” His goal, he adds, “is to bring to life the contradictory forces that now tear at the network.” Those forces are not limited to the enmity between Murdoch’s sons James and Lachlan and the machinations of their sister, Elisabeth, but includes the late, disgraced Roger Ailes, an arch-manipulator; Ailes loyalist Sean Hannity, “addicted to airtime and the sound of his own voice”; self-aggrandizing Tucker Carson; the recent Dominion lawsuit that cost the company hundreds of millions; and Murdoch himself, “disconcertingly inarticulate, seemingly stuck in a zeitgeist and emotional time warp, and barely able to function outside of his closed circle of henchmen.” Wolff is merciless in his characterization of Murdoch’s sons: Lachlan, weak and indecisive; James, simply “a prick”—supercilious, needing “to justify whatever choices he’s made and actions he’s taken as being of a higher order than everyone else’s. He is aided in this by a natural hostility and overweening smugness and a punch-before-getting-punched spirit.” Wolff weaves verbatim conversations, the inner thoughts of his melodramatic protagonists, and his own wide-ranging speculations to predict the eventual fall of Murdoch’s empire. Now 92, Rupert is “shaded by doubt, ambivalence, regret, and bafflement, and the harsh and clanging voices of his children. Not the best mindset with which to hold a kingdom.”
A sordid family and journalistic history.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250879271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
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