Middling, but readers who can’t get enough dirt on Trump and associates will revel in it.
A dishy takedown of the mediocrities, charlatans, and grifters populating the corridors of power in D.C.
A trigger warning that there’s naughty language ahead: As Daily Beast investigative reporters Markay and Suebsaeng write, they wanted to call their book Another Shitstorm in Fucktown: The Donald J. Trump Odyssey. Though the powers that be at their agency and publisher said no—think of the Costco and Walmart sales forgone—the authors allow that “we thought it felt like the only title that fully captured the essence of what the Trump era was really like.” There are plenty of people in the capital who won’t talk to the duo: the lieutenants and foot soldiers who enable the current occupant of the White House, men and women whom they refer to as “Trumpworld’s Henry Hills.” The reference, of course, is to the Mafia hit man who served the Lucchese crime family and inspired the film Goodfellas. While the authors aver that their sights are on those loyalists, they can’t keep their eyes off the prize, Trump himself, with his addled visions of being beloved by the show business figures in whose ranks he thinks he belongs. There’s lots of gossipy stuff here that readers may not have found in other sources—e.g., that a game designer sued Trump for ripping off a Monopoly-ish board game or that Trump used to litter the floor of the Apprentice studio with sucked-on Tic Tacs for the sheer joy of knowing that some peon had to clean up after him. The big picture isn’t much different from books such as Bob Woodward’s Fear and David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse Than You Think, but Markay and Suebsaeng are so breathless that it’s like reading Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon after a healthy diet of Peter Biskind and David Thomson.
Middling, but readers who can’t get enough dirt on Trump and associates will revel in it.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984878-56-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2020
IN THE NEWS
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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