A significant, deeply reported portrait of the madness that continues to grip the White House.
Two Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post journalists deliver an almost day-to-day chronicle of the first three years of the Donald Trump presidency, and it’s a wild ride.
Disparaging accounts of presidents remain a publishing staple, and many close to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were happy to reveal unflattering details. However, “unflattering” does not describe this portrait of Trump; “horrific” would be a better fit. Sadly, it’s entirely familiar. Marching through these pages is the same loose cannon who delighted audiences on The Apprentice. Trump made the rules, and those who didn’t measure up were berated, humiliated, and dismissed; no one questioned his authority. As president, the authors amply demonstrate, he still feels his word is law. When officials explain that an order—e.g., to “shut down” the border to keep out immigrants —would force them to break the law, his response was that he would pardon them. He admires dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un and expresses contempt for democratically elected European leaders. Trump knows little history or geography and has no interest in learning. Aides quickly recognized that listening to others at conferences bored him, and he refused to read briefing materials. Flash cards got his attention. He hated to be contradicted and publicly reviled those who irritated him, from personal assistants to elderly statesmen and generals, and he fired advisers with abandon. Eventually, they adapted. “Trump began the year 2019 as a president unchained,” write the authors in a highly depressing, meticulously documented chronicle. “He had replaced a raft of seasoned advisors with a cast of enablers who…saw their mission as telling the president yes.” Readers as dismayed as the authors should read one or two anti-Trump diatribes—as one of the best, this one will do nicely—and then swear off the genre and get to work.
A significant, deeply reported portrait of the madness that continues to grip the White House.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984877-49-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
