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
PERSPECTIVES
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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