Red meat for Trump foes and a convincing denunciation of the Republicans’ “win-at-all-costs electoral strategies.”
Fusion GPS founders Simpson and Fritsch enumerate the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors that put Donald Trump in the White House.
It’s clear early on that Fusion GPS, the Washington research and analysis firm headed by former Wall Street Journal staffers Simpson and Fritsch, set itself in opposition to Trump’s run for the presidency. “Many of his traits disqualified him for the job,” they write, “and his political rhetoric was loathsome, but his ties to the criminal underworld, his reliance on hidden flows of Russian money, and his record of chicanery in business topped the list.” Surprisingly, this opposition research was initially funded by a wealthy Republican who was appalled at the prospect of a Trump White House. The Steele dossier soon followed, delivered by a British intelligence agent whose allegations helped limn Trump’s ties to organized crime (including a cabal of Russians allied with the old-school Mafia) as well as financial misdeeds, various scams (Trump University, anyone?), and, most damning of all, willing collusion with Russia in interfering with the 2016 election. The authors carefully lay out their evidence, including charges that are only now coming to light, such as the involvement of Republican Congressman Devin Nunes in many of the proceedings as well as fundraising junkets to places such as Boston and Las Vegas, well outside his California district, “during which Nunes spent more than $130,000 on high-end hotels, meals, and NBA tickets, at the expense of his campaign committees.” Along the way, Simpson and Fritsch, who do not disguise their scorn for Trump and company, explore such milestones as the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Jr. and various Russian enterprises, which they hold might have been a “chicken feed” operation on the part of Russian intelligence. They also explore some of the flaws in the still-unfolding investigations into Trump, from Robert Mueller’s reticence to James Comey’s apparent incompetence.
Red meat for Trump foes and a convincing denunciation of the Republicans’ “win-at-all-costs electoral strategies.”Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13415-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
© 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
