A damning study of Trump’s mind that goes a long way toward explaining some damnably odd behavior.
When the CIA’s former lead shrink starts examining your head, a person might suspect that there’s trouble afoot.
There’s a long-standing principle in psychiatry that a doctor should not venture an analysis—a public profile, more formally—of someone without that person’s consent and without having made an in-person assessment. “The ethical principle seemed extreme and overdrawn,” writes Post (Narcissism and Politics, 2014, etc.) in light of the fact that other academicians, including psychologists and political scientists, regularly deliver opinions about the mind of Donald Trump. Forgive him the professional transgression, for what the author has to say is of pressing interest and helps elucidate much of Trump’s eccentric behavior. At the heart of the narrative is a portrait of the mental makeup of the narcissist, coupled with the mass psychology of a crowd of supporters who are locked into near worship of a charismatic leader. That charisma may not always be a bad thing; Post, for instance, attributes to it the success of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. But the narcissism component is seldom positive, and it explains many things about Trump. “The only loyalty a person with his malignant or pathological narcissism has is to himself and his own survival,” Post writes, and never mind the fate of those around that person, since loyalty flows only in the direction of Trump and not the other way. Paranoia, insecurity, bluster, constant aggression, and utter lack of empathy are other components of the template. Worse news comes at the end of this complex but unflagging account when he ponders the possibility that this will all end not with a whimper but a bang, either through the nuclear war that Trump has long feared or the refusal to relinquish office if defeated in 2020, since “the loss of the limelight which has been such a rewarding accompaniment of the presidential role will be very difficult for him to tolerate.”
A damning study of Trump’s mind that goes a long way toward explaining some damnably odd behavior.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-218-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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