Essential reading for students of the Trump corruption machine.
Why isn’t Donald Trump in prison? Perhaps because he has one of the country’s foremost law firms at his back.
Longtime Trump-watcher Enrich, the New York Times business investigations editor and author of Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, moves from finance to law in this account of Jones Day, a legal firm that expanded in D.C. over the last few decades in order to weave itself into “the fabric of the capital’s conservative firmament.” Founded in the 1890s in Cleveland, the company had always been conservative. However, under the guidance of principal Steve Brogan, it has turned increasingly hard right, “a champion of right-wing politics, organizing legal challenges to Obama’s health care program, white-collar prosecutions, government regulations, and voting rights laws.” Much of this turn involved Don McGahn, who was Trump’s in-house counsel for a couple of years until falling out over the Mueller Report. McGahn and his mentor, Ben Ginsberg, had not expected Trump to win, and they believed that Trump would convert his campaign into “an influence-buying PAC” that Jones Day would manage. “More than five years later,” when Trump lost decisively in the 2020 election, “the PACs were all that was left, and Jones Day was their law firm,” still exercising tremendous influence over Republican politics. The firm bought into Trump’s claims of electoral fraud, though not without some internal dissent. As the author shows, Jones Day—which had previously represented massive pharmaceutical and tobacco companies and the sex scandal–ridden Catholic Church—was vigorous in “trying to stop votes from being counted—not because they thought there was something improper underway (there was zero evidence of that), but because they detected an opportunity to use the law to give their side a political edge.” There are plenty of other shameful episodes, and Enrich is unblinking in reporting them, yielding a fast-moving, damning book.
Essential reading for students of the Trump corruption machine.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-14217-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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