A hilarious and pertinent parody to help pass the time until the November election decides the nation’s fate.
Lithgow continues his poetic skewering of “a POTUS whose pants are routinely on fire.”
In this clever follow-up to Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse (2019), the actor and author unleashes more razor-sharp satirical wit, lampooning the second half of “our distractible,” Twitter-obsessed chief’s presidential term. Lithgow begins with the impeachment in late 2019 and moves through the litany of lies and blunders that have formed the Trump administration’s teetering foundation. Beyond the primary target, the author also draws farcical caricatures of fumbling politicos like senior advisers and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani (“filled with rage and babbling bluster, / ‘America’s Mayor’ has lost his luster”). Lithgow renders Mitch McConnell as a manipulative, suffocatingly partisan reptile: “By keeping his party in line and tight-knitted, / The Tortoise prevailed and got Dumpty acquitted / But by treating the trial as a legal blood sport, / He rendered the Senate a kangaroo court.” Political strategist and a man Lithgow calls the “dirty trickster, artful dodger,” Roger Stone gets a full-page poem and makes good company with another Trump blunder: “substituting his Sharpie for science” after mistracking Hurricane Dorian. The cover art and interior line drawings provide suitable graphic accompaniment to the text. As with the first volume, this one is a short, succinct, laugh-out-loud affair, and no one in the Trump administration is above Lithgow’s eagle-eyed scrutiny. Unwilling to leave even readers with limited political knowledge behind, the author also includes brief profiles of the politicians that he eviscerates. All the snarky novelty doesn’t reveal anything new nor untrue; rather, Lithgow whisks the obvious into a creatively brilliant distraction that most readers will enjoy. Even loyal Trumpers may find a stray chuckle for the ridiculousness and the current administration’s political circus.
A hilarious and pertinent parody to help pass the time until the November election decides the nation’s fate.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-79720-946-3
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Chronicle Prism
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
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