A thorough if sometimes glib account of a disastrous presidency.
Relive the Trump administration from the perspectives of the toadies who enabled it.
Veteran New York Times Washington reporter Leibovich focuses the narrative on “the Sean Spicers, Kellyanne Conways, [and] any of the other Washington C-listers who were bumped temporarily up to B-list status by their proximity to Donald J. Trump.” Everywhere he looks, he finds White House aides and GOP leaders privately bemoaning the president while publicly defending him. It doesn’t take deep political acumen to figure out the root of this hypocrisy: Playing nice with a demonstrably inept, petty, and heartless leader was a path to power. As a result, the author’s chronicle of the Trump era, from the early debates through the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, is light on analysis and heavier on portraits of the cowards. For example, a panicky Spicer, Trump’s first lie-peddling press secretary, demanded that Leibovich not write that he puts on makeup before going on TV. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions steps into the attorney general role “terrified and shaken, like a beagle in a thunderstorm.” Former House Speaker Paul Ryan recalls sobbing over the Capitol insurrection while dodging his complicity in Trump’s rise. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham proves the most craven of all, if more honest about his consistent aspiration to “try to be relevant.” GOP push back, when it existed, came from those who had little to lose politically (Mitt Romney), were near death (John McCain), or principled enough to jump ship (Liz Cheney). Leibovich ably captures this milieu, and he's cleareyed about Trump’s dangers. However, that awareness sometimes clashes with his breezy, Twitter-dunk-style delivery, which emphasizes the sideshow at the expense of the crisis. Now that the GOP is more cult than political party, one former Republican congressman noted that its main approach to Trump is “just waiting for him to die,” a strategy more pathetic than funny.
A thorough if sometimes glib account of a disastrous presidency.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-29631-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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