Think of it as a user-friendly—and utterly damning—explication of the Mueller Report. Read it. Then vote.
Has Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses? Yes—and then some, as New Yorker writer and CNN legal analyst Toobin chronicles in this catalog of crime.
Robert Mueller concluded his investigation of the president’s misdoings by grouping them into two broad categories. One, examining Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, was inconclusive even though Mueller “had uncovered a genuinely massive conspiracy in Russia, stretching from the military to the private sector, to interfere in the most solid rite of our democracy”—namely, the 2016 presidential election. The other was Trump’s flagrant obstruction of justice in acts committed before, during, and after the investigation, as when he fired FBI director James Comey soon after entering office. Trump has never bothered to even give the impression that he is not corrupt; when the impeachment proceedings began in 2019, he reacted by threatening and blustering while taking care not to leave a paper trail. That has always been his way, as his former attorney Michael Cohen has documented, and “Mueller’s report, if read carefully, establishes that Trump committed several acts of criminal obstruction of justice.” Toobin delivers a painstakingly constructed record of Trump’s crimes, never mincing words: For example, were it not for Rudolph Giuliani’s ineptitude as an attorney, “Donald Trump would not have been impeached.” In the months since his impeachment, Trump has bungled everything he’s touched. For one, writes Toobin, “Trump addressed the coronavirus the same way that he confronted his Russia and Ukraine scandals—with bluster, blame shifting, vindictiveness, and lies.” It’s a depressing record, and Toobin’s careful narrative yields mostly despair for the fate of the republic. As he concludes, “For Trump, his presidency was more about him that what he could accomplish,” and what Trump has accomplished is mostly destruction.
Think of it as a user-friendly—and utterly damning—explication of the Mueller Report. Read it. Then vote.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-53673-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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
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