A handy primer on a troublesome Trump in-law, even setting its gossipy parts aside.
A dishy, skeptical portrait of Jared Kushner, the naive, overleveraged, and conflict-mired developer’s son who has Donald Trump’s ear.
Intermittently, anyway. A running theme of investigative reporter Ward’s (The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons, 2014, etc.) book is that the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka is so clumsily meddling that the president keeps him at arm’s length. “Get rid of my kids, get them back to New York,” Trump reportedly said of “Javanka” six months into his administration, after their presence became like sticky tar in the West Wing. How did Kushner, with no political or foreign policy experience, become the White House’s point person on corporate innovation and peace in the Middle East? Thereon hangs a tail of greed, incompetence, desperation, and felonious behavior. Jared’s father, Charlie, was a mercurial New Jersey developer who wasn’t above tax fraud and blackmail to get ahead. (He was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005.) Jared was key to restoring the family’s good name, which entailed a role in the family real estate business, though he “was hardly ever in the office”; a job as publisher of the New York Observer, though journalism baffled him; and his marrying Ivanka, another scion of a developer with a dodgy history. When Jared doesn’t seem out of his depth, he seems corrupt; much of Ward’s story turns on his disreputable dealings with Saudi and Qatari leaders, perhaps pursued in hopes of covering the $1.2 billion mortgage on a Manhattan Kushner property. Many details here have been previously reported, and the author’s efforts to elevate the book above a clip job rest mainly on a raft of juicy quotes delivered by anonymous sources. (“Jared is as sinister as Donald Trump,” intones a “business associate.”) As a portrait of Jared’s character, the book’s fiendish aura is hard to trust, but given the factual record, it’s not out of bounds.
A handy primer on a troublesome Trump in-law, even setting its gossipy parts aside.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18594-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2019
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 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
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