Top-notch political satire from a practiced pen.
A celebrated political satirist eviscerates know-nothing politicians, mostly Republicans.
Over the past 50 years, the Republican Party has continuously nominated incurious, poorly read, and laughably unprepared candidates for public office, with puppet masters in the wings to minimize the damage. Such is the all-too-convincing premise of Borowitz’s exhaustively detailed, devastatingly funny takedown of a veritable Mount Rushmore of incompetents: “People sometimes call our nation ‘the American experiment.’ Recently, though, we’ve been lab rats in another, perverse American experiment, seemingly designed to answer this question: Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect?” If this parade of intellectual lightweights began its “Age of Ignorance” with Ronald Reagan, writes the author, it reached its nadir with Donald Trump. In the hallowed tradition of Will Rogers, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, and other cleareyed satirists, Borowitz skewers all manner of chronically befuddled, willfully ignorant dolts: Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene (a “prolific QAnon loudmouth”), Matt Gaetz (the “ultimate specimen of Florida Man”), Lauren Boebert, and former football coach Tommy Tuberville, who once said, “There is one person that changes climate in this country and that is God.” Ravaging this seemingly endless rogues’ gallery of buffoonery and corruption, Borowitz marshals mind-boggling, breathtaking evidence. In pillorying Trump, he’s shooting fish in a barrel, but even worse are the unprincipled “handlers” behind the scenes: Roy Cohn, Stu Spencer, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, et al. Democrats don’t get a pass, but Borowitz clearly demonstrates that Republicans are unrivaled in behaving as if stupidity was a virtue. While there are countless laughs in the book, they have a rueful edge given that we are all affected by such widespread ignorance. “In this book,” he writes, “I’ve made nothing up. All the events I’m about to describe actually happened. They’re a part of American history. Unfortunately.”
Top-notch political satire from a practiced pen.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66800-388-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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