No surprises for followers of the news but an ominous warning about the future.
A look at the madness that pervades the Oval Office.
CNN co-anchor and correspondent Sciutto offers a sweeping assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency, focused on the president’s erratic, baffling leadership style, which he dubs the “Madman Theory.” “By numerous accounts,” writes the author, “President Trump as commander in chief is self-confident, impulsive, and skeptical of official advice,” foreign allies, and career diplomats. He is willing to ignore information, contradict and defy advisers, and he believes that he alone knows best. To fuel his analysis, Sciutto draws on media coverage, conversations with administration officials, and interviews with Mick Mulroy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East; Susan Gordon, the country’s “second-highest-ranking intelligence official”; Fiona Hill, former European and Russian affairs director on the National Security Council; Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser; Joseph Yun, special representative for North Korea policy; and Steve Bannon. Emerging from many sources is a portrait of “a former businessman applying the lessons and rules of the New York real estate market to world affairs and in the process jettisoning a values basis for US foreign policy.” For some, such as Navarro, Trump’s pragmatism is an asset. Others vehemently disagree. “Depending on whom you ask,” Sciutto writes, “Trump the ‘madman’ is either a danger or a secret weapon, brilliant or incompetent, a ‘madman’ by choice to gain advantage in negotiations, or a ‘madman’ by accident who overestimates his own abilities and undermines the interests and safety of the nation.” After examining Trump’s handling of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Ukraine, and COVID-19, Sciutto agrees with those who characterize Trump’s approach to the world and to the presidency as “minimize, politicize, personalize, demonize the experts, and rarely strategize.” The coronavirus, Sciutto concludes, “may be the crisis that finally exposed the emptiness at the core of ‘America First.’ ”
No surprises for followers of the news but an ominous warning about the future.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-300568-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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