A prime source for those following the chain of trials awaiting the disgraced former president.
The full story behind Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to fix the vote in Georgia.
The spur for Fani Willis to file charges against Trump, write veteran journalists Isikoff and Klaidman, was Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, with Trump’s much-aired plea, “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Willis, a county prosecutor, has been accused of reaching beyond her bailiwick, but one end of that recorded call happened in her county, the other in Florida—and though Florida requires that both parties to a call consent to its being recorded, that requirement is waived in the case of law enforcement. Isikoff and Klaidman reveal that Trump was fixated on Georgia, which he fervently believed he should have won, overlooking the increasing blueness of the state’s most populous counties. He was seemingly obsessed with the thought that two Black election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, had miscounted the vote to deliver the state to Biden. As Freeman later remarked, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” Trump’s “laser-focus” on Georgia yielded much illegal activity from his administration and followers, including a plot to plant a slate of false electors, but also threats of violence against election workers and officials. One recipient was Raffensperger, who was oddly reluctant all the same to participate in Willis’ case, having “made it clear from the start that if he was going to talk, he wanted a grand jury subpoena first.” In many respects, Isikoff and Klaidman make Willis’ case for her, though it awaits a courtroom airing, and they document beyond reasonable doubt the desperate efforts of Trump and company to subvert the democratic process.
A prime source for those following the chain of trials awaiting the disgraced former president.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781538739990
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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