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
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
