Preaching to the choir? Yes, but it’s a sermon that seemingly requires constant reiteration.
A depressingly cogent litany of the current president’s unbelievably spectacular failures.
Following his recent memoir, From the Left, longtime journalist Press, host of an eponymous show and former host of Crossfire, lays into Donald Trump and the “chaos and corruption [that] have become our new normal.” To be sure, the author could have likely extended this book out another couple hundred reasons, but the portrait on offer here is ugly enough as it is. Divided into sections such as “Trump’s Disastrous Acts as President,” “Trump Fans the Flames of Racism,” and “Trump’s Impeachable Offenses,” the book is a solid resource for the millions of Americans attempting to keep track of the near-daily lies and half-baked Twitter tirades. Press ably limns his subject’s myriad faults—pathological lying (“whatever demonstrable falsehood bubbles up to the surface of his brain is always, for him, the right thing to say at that moment”), laziness, racism, sexism, rampant xenophobia, obsession with Hillary Clinton, addiction to Fox News, inability to understand even the most basic elements of governance—and unprecedented attacks on some of the most important institutions in the U.S., including health care, the media, an open internet, and the social safety net. The author also delves into “Trump’s Cabinet of Thieves,” a who’s who of corruption and incompetence: They’re all here, from Scott Pruitt to Ryan Zinke to Rick Perry to Betsy DeVos. Trump devotees and hard-right Republicans will no doubt find fault with the book—or not read it—but Press is beyond reproach in his research and documentation. And as for that single reason for Trump to stay? You guessed it: Vice President Mike Pence, who “would be even more dangerous” as president. As the author writes, “he’s even more conservative than Trump—former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren calls him ‘as far right as you could go without falling off the earth”—and a lot more effective.”
Preaching to the choir? Yes, but it’s a sermon that seemingly requires constant reiteration.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30647-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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