A readable and maddening account of the ongoing constitutional crisis that is the Trump White House.
A swiftly paced history of the events surrounding the Mueller report and its aftermath.
Donald Trump likes nothing better than to double down: First, he solicited Russian help in gaining office, then tried to extort Ukraine to assist his second run by withholding military aid. The result was impeachment. Write award-winning journalists and longtime Trump watchers D’Antonio and Eisner, given “Trump’s extraordinary need to create a fantasy self who occupies the center of a fantastical story that he demands that others accept” and seeming belief that he is above the law, impeachment was the only option. The authors provide a comprehensive account of the process of impeachment, support for it steadily growing as more evidence was revealed—and that accelerated with such events as Trump’s sacking of the ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was dedicated to the cause of battling corruption. “Take her out,” Trump ordered, which “sounded like something a movie mob boss might say.” In this account, like in countless others, Trump emerges as an inveterate liar and bush-league gangster, if one ever quick with a lame excuse: Mueller had it in for him, Trump complained, “because of a long-ago dispute over a charge at a Trump golf course”; of course, the charges against him were all witch hunt and hoax. His incompetence, they add, would be underscored by his handling of the pandemic. That the impeachment charges were narrow and specific meant that many impeachable offenses did not enter into discussion, such as committing perjury under oath and illegally diverting funds to build the border wall; omission of these “high crimes and misdemeanors” may well have been a strategic error that doomed the enterprise. The end of their account deems the impeachment, though seemingly forgotten a year later, “the inevitable product of the dangerous experiment begun when a demagogue who had made corruption and impunity part of his public identity gained the presidency.”
A readable and maddening account of the ongoing constitutional crisis that is the Trump White House.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-76667-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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