A valuable set of program notes; readers will eagerly wait to see if prosecutors act as Snell hopes they will.
A trial lawyer explores the many ways that Donald Trump has succeeded in evading punishment—and how to thwart him henceforth.
Snell, who successfully prosecuted Trump for the Trump University fraud, argues that when confronted with lawsuits or criminal charges, Trump is his own worst enemy, “a cheap, predatory asshole who doesn’t pay his bills” and who doesn’t listen to his own underqualified lawyers. Trump has managed to stay out of trouble, Snell opines, by using tactics that can be overcome. One is the mob-boss trick of intimidating witnesses, which a few recently delivered gag rules haven’t done much to curb—but, if the judges do their jobs, could land Trump in jail. “If at all possible, get Trump under oath—and he will hang himself,” Snell urges. It’s possible but unlikely, writes the author, that Trump will agree on a plea deal that will still land him in prison, for the walls are closing in. “He’s losing in court, and he knows it,” Snell writes, “so now he’s aiming to undermine the courts entirely, to declare them all illegitimate.” But the courts are where he is, and it’s not because anyone’s out to get him. As Snell observes, he’s in court in 2023 and 2024 because he committed a swarm of alleged crimes in 2020 and 2021, and it takes a couple of years for things to go before the bench. When the former president lashes out at his legal opponents, most viciously against women and especially women of color, take that as a sign that the prosecutors are on the right track. Cheapness, narcissism, bullying: They’re not likely to work this time, Snell concludes, as they have for so many years in the past.
A valuable set of program notes; readers will eagerly wait to see if prosecutors act as Snell hopes they will.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781685891251
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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