A decidedly minor, though occasionally entertaining, addition to the sad library of Trumpiana.
A former Trump staffer reveals what by now are mostly open secrets.
As Trump’s press secretary for eight months, Grisham famously held no press briefings—not that there was any shortage of news. One reason, it seems, was that keeping the press away was a good way to stay out of trouble. Her predecessor, Sean Spicer, drew ridicule on Day 1 for a patent lie: “Forcing Sean to claim that the inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s, which I imagine Sean also knew was bullshit, was a test. Trump always wanted to see how far you would go to do his bidding; it was his way of measuring your loyalty.” Grisham offers little hard news, but she dishes well. Trump emerges, as in practically every other account, as an enraged, lecherous ogre with a preadolescent brain and a complete lack of any ability to censor himself. Melania Trump bears the Secret Service code name Rapunzel “because she remained in her tower, never descending.” When she did, it was usually to commit some faux pas, like the “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket while on the way to visit incarcerated children on the border. (“What a stupid thing to do.”) Regarding other family members, Ivanka has the depth of an inflatable pool and Jared Kushner, a scheming nature that far transcends the term Machiavellian, with the two showing up at John McCain’s funeral just to be seen. All the “mostly middle-aged white dudes” who made up the Cabinet were useless in the face of events such as “one of our first huge embarrassing, insulting, tone-deaf disasters,” namely Trump’s abysmal response to the White supremacist march in Charlottesville. And so forth, with few surprises, thanks to a narrative path already paved by dozens of other books, save for its moral: In the Trump White House, “instead of focusing on getting productive work done, you just want to survive.”
A decidedly minor, though occasionally entertaining, addition to the sad library of Trumpiana.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-314293-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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