Fascinating, in-depth portraits within the halls of power.
An official White House photographer gives an insider's tour of the West Wing and its key personnel.
Distinguished photo journalist Souza—chief photographer during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama as well as the longtime director of White House Photography—presents valuable documentation in the form of vivid, full-color photos and accompanying explanatory text. Souza’s job covering the president and his team required long days “inside the presidential bubble,” whether in the White House or on the road (more than 25,000 hours during Obama’s tenure). He begins his tour of "The People's House" with photos from the Oval Office, where, because of the room's many windows, the light constantly changed. He chronicles numerous brief yet indelible moments—e.g., when a member of the press knocked over a glass of water on the Resolute Desk—and we learn that Obama always edited his speeches with a black Uni-ball Vision Elite pen. Souza takes readers into the Outer Oval, the Cabinet Room, the Roosevelt Room, the Situation Room, the Brady Press Briefing Room, the Rose Garden, and the State Floor. But Souza's focus is always on the people who inhabit these spaces. We meet the White House butler and chefs. We see a variety of performances and events on the South Lawn and Beyoncé performing inside a tent at a state dinner for the president of Mexico in 2010. The "On the Road" section includes many trips foreign and domestic aboard Air Force One; during the Reagan years, it was a Boeing 707, but since 1989, there have been two identical 747-200Bs. Souza offers candid portraits of the traveling White House staff, including the military aide who carries the presidential "football" and the president's personal aide, his "body man." Throughout, the author uses his unprecedented access to create up-close and personal studies, informal moments dressed up in formal clothes, of the powerful people who populate the presidential bubble.
Fascinating, in-depth portraits within the halls of power.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-38337-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Voracious/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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