A detailed, deeply reported portrait of a president willfully obstructing justice—with plenty of help.
A damning portrait of the “dangerous figure” occupying the White House.
But her emails! As New York Times reporter Schmidt writes, in its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for official correspondence, the FBI found more than 100 instances of sensitive data but no reason to believe that the breaches were intentional. It’s a far more benign case than any that the author offers with Donald Trump in the lead role. FBI director James Comey, who brought up the Clinton emails right before the 2016 election, suspected ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian help, the leitmotif of Schmidt’s book, but his cautious probes were of little help to those bound up in the “epic struggle to restrain an unbound president.” Granted, Comey busted Michael Flynn early on: “He lied to the FBI, and lies suggest cover-ups. Now, the relationship between Trump, his associates, and the Russians appeared even more suspicious.” Trump asked Comey to let Flynn slide, a wish he wouldn’t get for three years, when William Barr did just that, proving that “the president had bent Washington to his will.” Schmidt’s account embraces the star-crossed Mueller Report, its lead author hobbled by orders from above that he not investigate Trump’s financial ties to Russia, even as Trump constantly threatened to fire him. Central to the story is Trump’s former counsel, Don McGahn, “one of the main reasons Mueller knew so much.” McGahn cooperated with investigators (and, reluctantly and briefly, with Schmidt) even though he was fearful that Trump would fire him, too, before he could finish his project of packing the courts with conservative judges. In this complicated, twisting narrative, the author notes that while the Mueller Report is seemingly moot, it provides prosecutors the wherewithal to charge Trump with crimes after he leaves office—one reason for Trump not to want to do so.
A detailed, deeply reported portrait of a president willfully obstructing justice—with plenty of help.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984854-66-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
IN THE NEWS
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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