A significant, deeply reported portrait of the madness that continues to grip the White House.
Two Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post journalists deliver an almost day-to-day chronicle of the first three years of the Donald Trump presidency, and it’s a wild ride.
Disparaging accounts of presidents remain a publishing staple, and many close to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were happy to reveal unflattering details. However, “unflattering” does not describe this portrait of Trump; “horrific” would be a better fit. Sadly, it’s entirely familiar. Marching through these pages is the same loose cannon who delighted audiences on The Apprentice. Trump made the rules, and those who didn’t measure up were berated, humiliated, and dismissed; no one questioned his authority. As president, the authors amply demonstrate, he still feels his word is law. When officials explain that an order—e.g., to “shut down” the border to keep out immigrants —would force them to break the law, his response was that he would pardon them. He admires dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un and expresses contempt for democratically elected European leaders. Trump knows little history or geography and has no interest in learning. Aides quickly recognized that listening to others at conferences bored him, and he refused to read briefing materials. Flash cards got his attention. He hated to be contradicted and publicly reviled those who irritated him, from personal assistants to elderly statesmen and generals, and he fired advisers with abandon. Eventually, they adapted. “Trump began the year 2019 as a president unchained,” write the authors in a highly depressing, meticulously documented chronicle. “He had replaced a raft of seasoned advisors with a cast of enablers who…saw their mission as telling the president yes.” Readers as dismayed as the authors should read one or two anti-Trump diatribes—as one of the best, this one will do nicely—and then swear off the genre and get to work.
A significant, deeply reported portrait of the madness that continues to grip the White House.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984877-49-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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