The reviews are in for John Bolton’s memoir, and they’re decidedly mixed.
Critics are ambivalent about the former national security adviser’s much-hyped book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, which went on sale Tuesday despite the Trump administration’s efforts to halt its publication.
The reviewer for Kirkus called the book “thoroughly self-serving,” and noted that it contains “more confirmation of malfeasance than fresh news, but the message is clear: Voter, beware.”
At the Washington Post, David Ignatius called the book “a knockout punch” that “will astonish you,” but also wrote that “Bolton’s utter lack of self-criticism is one of the book’s significant shortcomings” and that “his self-satisfaction becomes annoying.”
Publishers Weekly was unimpressed with the book, with a reviewer archly noting that “the bombshell to chaff ratio in this well-informed yet self-serving account is tilted punishingly in the wrong direction.”
Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times didn’t find much to like about the book at all, writing, “The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.”
Booksellers also seem to be greeting the book’s publication with ambivalence. Publishers Weekly reports that some indie bookstores are refusing to sell the book at all, including Postmark Books in Rosedale, New York, whose owner Jesse Post said, “We have plenty of well reported and better intentioned books about the Trump White House we can sell people who are interested to learn more.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
