Just the thing for Biden haters and insurrectionists.
A preening, defiant memoir by a Trump stalwart.
While the flood of their memoirs shows no sign of letting up, even the most full-throated of Trump’s supporters allow that storming the Capitol was maybe not such a good idea. Not Pompeo, who mentions it only once, as “that January 6, the one the Left wants to exploit for political advantage.” The author doesn’t discuss the coup attempt or other inconvenient truths of Trump’s last days, but there’s plenty about Pompeo being exactly the right man for the right job—jobs, rather—that Trump offered him. Pompeo, top of his West Point class and fearless Kansas congressman, knew that his duty was to save the CIA, which “desperately needed good leadership” after John Brennan, “a total disaster.” By Pompeo’s account, it was he, as secretary of state, who made Iran blink, North Korea flinch, and Putin behave. (That Russia/Trump business? A hoax. The Hunter Biden laptop thing, however, is very real and very important.) According to the author’s account, he did all of this almost single-handedly, since supposed fellow traveler John Bolton, among others, “cared far more about taking credit and nurturing his ego than he did for executing the president’s directives….If everyone had behaved as selfishly as Bolton had, very little would ever have gotten accomplished.” Pompeo proves that one can be a dedicated Trumper and also endlessly self-serving. Granted, he does give a shoutout or two to others in the administration, mostly nameless, as when he writes, “In the end, our team left America more secure and more respected—even if not always more loved—in the world,” not like the present administration, which is to blame for all that’s wrong today—except maybe Covid-19, which came out of a Chinese lab. Pompeo also makes room to advocate for waterboarding.
Just the thing for Biden haters and insurrectionists.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780063247444
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
An ardent defense of storytelling.
Telling tales.
A prolific writer across a range of genres, Winterson examines the richness of One Thousand and One Nights to argue passionately for the power of imagination. Melding memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, she pays homage to Shahrazad, consummate inventor of seductive tales, who enlightens her captor—and would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar—about the power of imagination. “Imagination is key,” Winterson writes. “To see past the present, with its assumptions and constraints. To see round corners.” Stories teach us about what it means to be human, including that being human “can mean appearing in other shapes and other forms.” Stories, as the author discovered in her own life, give us permission to break out of ill-fitting strictures. Growing up lesbian, an only child and adoptee in an ultrareligious evangelical home, she felt that she was “simultaneously hiding a true self and finding a true self.” In the library, she found liberation in fiction that gave her a chance to imagine “what it is like to be someone else” and to inhabit new worlds. “One of the things I love about fiction,” she writes, “is that we can—and do—escape our fate. A word of caution here. This may not mean the characters in the story.” Turning to Shahrazad’s stories, Winterson notes that recurring themes are “harm done to those who are innocent” and “failure to recognise what is valuable, and what is worthless.” What is worthless, according to her, is mind-numbing work and rampant consumerism, for which, she speculates, sentient AI may provide an escape, having no interest in material acquisitions: “The invisible, unfettered, unbounded, non-material life of the imagination, and what it invents, that is the basis of reality.”
An ardent defense of storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167118
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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