A wide-ranging history of a tangled campaign—catnip for politics junkies.
A carefully structured account of the many moving parts that turned the Democratic Party into a resistance movement against Trump.
Barack Obama, writes Atlantic lead political correspondent Dovere, “never understood why people disliked [Hillary] Clinton so much. He could also never get over how bad a campaigner she was.” He didn’t do much to help in her campaign until it was too late. Somehow Trump managed to squeak by her even as Obama finally told aides, “do you really want a psychopath sitting at that desk?” and ordered them to do something to get that message through to voters. Yet, Dovere writes, there was a certain continuity to a vote for Obama in 2008 and a vote for Trump in 2016: Both were outsiders running a populist campaign, if of very different dispositions. Obama tried to guide Trump to effectiveness after the election, suggesting that he “make a few patches to Obamacare and call it Trumpcare” and warning him not to hire Michael Flynn, whose Russian connections were already well known. Trump ignored the advice. His intransigence emerged early, moving Nancy Pelosi to challenge his claim that he had won the popular vote. Trump was great for Obama, Dovere notes, retrospectively erasing the errors he made in office, while resistance to Trump soon became marching orders for party stalwarts. Some of the newsworthy items in this book: Clinton contemplated running again in 2020 only to conclude that if she did, Bernie Sanders would be the guaranteed candidate. She hoped instead for a deadlocked convention by which the Democrats would call her back by acclaim. It was to the Democrats’ good fortune, Dovere suggests, that Trump was so inept, especially with respect to the pandemic, and that the Republican Party “was defining itself as the check against America’s changing.” That America was changing seems to have eluded them all, leaving Trump a loser “on the biggest stage of his life.”
A wide-ranging history of a tangled campaign—catnip for politics junkies.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984878-07-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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