A modest, soft-spoken book that is sure to enrage its chief subject.
Former FBI director Comey, much in the news, reviews his career and speaks his mind about his dismissal.
“I fully intended to serve as director of the FBI through the year 2023,” writes Comey, that year being when his 10-year term, begun under Barack Obama, expired. “What, I wondered, could possibly interfere with that?” The “what” was Donald Trump, who, under investigation for various improprieties committed during his campaign and perhaps after, demanded personal loyalty of Comey and did not receive the required affirmative reply. “Holy crap, they are trying to make each of us an ‘amica nostra’—friend of ours,” he writes, adverting to time he spent pursuing Mafia figures as a federal prosecutor in New York. As has been well-reported, the author weighs Trump and his colleagues and finds them wanting in every way: “this president is unethical,” he charges, “and untethered to truth and institutional values.” That president, he adds with a touch of informed speculation, is also bound for greater legal troubles than he has faced thus far. Comey looks back on a long career marked by such signature moments as his uncovering Dick Cheney associate Scooter Libby as the person who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, a matter over which he came under considerable pressure to back off the case, one of the many “exhausting lessons in the importance of institutional loyalty over expediency and politics” that he would learn in service to three administrations. Along the way, aside from a couple of personal digs at Trump’s clothing style and hand size, Comey serves up some well-observed remarks on the qualities of a successful leader, including humor, “accurate feedback” and pushing for improvement, especially self-improvement—again, all matters in which the current occupant of the White House falls short. Not all the book will be convincing, especially to supporters of Trump’s opponent, whose campaign suffered a tremendous blow when Comey announced that she, too, was under investigation.
A modest, soft-spoken book that is sure to enrage its chief subject.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19245-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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