A thoroughly depressing portrait.
Abundant testimony regarding how the current president is a bully, a narcissist, and a sexual predator.
Offering information about 67 incidents of alleged inappropriate behavior, some from women speaking out for the first time, investigative reporter Levine and Paris-based journalist El-Faizy (God and Country: How Evangelicals Have Become America’s New Mainstream, 2006) create a disturbing exposé of Donald Trump’s relationships with women. Raised by a diffident mother who ignored her husband’s philandering, and a cruel, demanding father, the young Donald was a bully; at the age of 13, was sent to the New York Military Academy, where he fit right in to the school’s culture of violence. As a young adult, he took sexual libertine Hugh Hefner and sleazy lawyer Roy Cohn as role models. Tall, good-looking, and rich, he had no trouble attracting the “fake blondes with boobs” that he preferred, including Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech ski champion and model, whom he met in 1976 and married the next year. Beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious, she became a helpmate to the rising real estate mogul, proving herself so competent that Trump came to resent her. Although they were touted in gossip columns as the “golden couple” of the 1980s, Trump pursued “very young women”—younger than 21—one model told the authors, whom he subjected to groping, forcible kissing, and exposure when he barged into their dressing rooms. Besides partying at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion and frequenting hot nightclubs, in the 1990s, Trump started his own modeling agency and bought the Miss Universe Organization, the better to supply his demand for women. The authors recount his 1993 marriage to Marla Maples, after their daughter Tiffany was born; and to Melania Knauss. Besides anecdotes and testimony, including from a few women who defend their admiration for Trump, a 50-page appendix augments details about women mentioned in the book, as well as others. Despite revealing a few new voices, the authors present little that most readers don’t already know about America’s crude, crass leader.
A thoroughly depressing portrait.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-49266-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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