Firmly in the secondary tier of books about the bizarre, chaotic crew at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The one-time reality TV contestant and player in an ongoing White House drama bares all—and hints at more.
According to Newman, there’s a recording out there with the N-word spilling out of the mouth of the sitting president. “During production,” she writes, “he was miked, and there is definitely an audio track.” That she or some other former staffer hasn’t brought forth such a thing, she suggests, is just a matter of time, but no matter. Here, the former Apprentice cast member dishes on Donald Trump—and just about everyone else in the White House in the last couple of years. A few are spared: Anthony Scaramucci, for instance, was “cocky and arrogant…but oddly likable,” while Trump referred to Kellyanne Conway’s contrarian husband as “Flip,” for “f*cking little island people,” a reference to his Filipino heritage. As for first daughter Ivanka? “Like her father,” writes the author, “Ivanka was thin-skinned and could not seem to take a joke.” But most of the news, such as it is, in this memoir is about Trump himself, and there’s not much that even the casual observer wouldn’t know: Trump thrives on chaos? Check. He has anger issues? Check. The White House is a mess? Check. The memoir serves as reinforcement, in other words, rather than as fresh meat, and as such, it’s fairly dispensable, especially as the author attempts to explain why she went to the Trump side in the first place: She came from a rough side of town where wealth and power were aspirations and those who had them were role models, and as for his aberrations, well, “he was just overwhelmed, as we all were, by the awesome responsibility of leading the nation.” Once the veil is lifted and she escapes “from the cult of Trumpworld,” things get a little more critical—Racist? Check. Rattled? Check—but no more newsworthy.
Firmly in the secondary tier of books about the bizarre, chaotic crew at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982109-70-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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