Not just for his fans but not likely to find much of an audience beyond the base, either.
The Fox News pundit gathers reportage and commentary.
It’s easy to forget that Carlson, fuming with anti-liberal calumny and overflowing with blustery misinformation, was once a journalist. Some of that journalism was good. For example, in 2003, he accompanied Al Sharpton, Cornel West, and several Nation of Islam stalwarts on a fact-finding mission to Liberia, where a civil war was raging. “I was in favor of seeing that,” Carlson writes, “but mostly I went because I liked Al Sharpton.” Why? Because they shared some common enemies, and, Carlson adds, “shared loathing tends to form a bond.” The author also serves up a revealing portrait of Ron Paul, whose quirky ideas about the economy motivated a surprisingly well-informed following: “The constitutionality of a central bank is not an issue you see on many lists of voter concerns.” His piece for Talk magazine on George W. Bush is surprisingly insightful, even as he confesses that all these years later, he still doesn’t know what to make of Bush II. Where Carlson loses the thread is in the introductions to these older, sturdy pieces and in a longer introduction to the book as a whole, sections full of plaintive expressions of privilege. “I’d like to acknowledge Jonathan Karp of Simon & Schuster,” he writes on the first page, “whose descent from open-minded book editor to cartoonish corporate censor mirrors the decline of America itself. It’s been a sad education watching it happen.” (Watching Carlson’s TV show is a sad education in itself.) The author is angry that Karp canceled Josh Hawley’s book after the Jan. 6 insurrection. What did Hawley do wrong? whimpers Carlson, apparently forgetting Hawley’s raised fist to the gathering mob—and that it’s the privilege of a private business to make such decisions. Most offensive are Carlson’s bloviations about America’s bitter divisions, apparently forgetting that he has been a loud, active, and well-paid agent of those schisms.
Not just for his fans but not likely to find much of an audience beyond the base, either.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8369-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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