A satisfying neck-craning look at the raging dumpster fire of Trump’s final months in office.
The veteran journalist delivers an in-the-bunker account of the disastrous end of the Trump administration.
Following Fire and Fury and Siege, Wolff makes it clear that Trump is our first postmodern president, completely uninterested in doing any real work but obsessed with the media and his media image: “What was on television left a greater impression on him than what was said to him, or what intelligence he received, or what facts were known.” He surrounded himself with corrupt operators, cheerleaders, and, at the end, “crazies [who] kept identifying people who were even crazier.” In this well-paced but seldom newsworthy account of the weeks between the 2020 election and the Trump family’s anticlimactic departure on Inauguration Day, Wolff depicts a thoroughly inept, endlessly self-dealing swirl of hangers-on and sycophants whose goal was singular: to gain Machiavellian advantage while always “assuring the president that he was right.” In between the lines, the author suggests that Trump was fully aware that his retinue was loyal in order to be rewarded and was contemptuous of them all. Regarding the associate who proved perhaps the most loyal in the end, Rudy Giuliani, Wolff writes that Trump has frozen him out of his would-be shadow government at Mar-a-Lago and won’t pay any of his bills. Meanwhile, anyone with a wisp of competence was long gone before Election Day, leaving it to the likes of Sidney Powell to attempt to make Trump’s case that the election had been stolen from him and to defend him in his second impeachment. A few memorable episodes make the book worthy of attention: Trump showing patent scorn for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol at his behest or promising that he’ll be back in 2024, ready to exact vengeance on everyone who’s ever crossed him.
A satisfying neck-craning look at the raging dumpster fire of Trump’s final months in office.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-83001-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2021
IN THE NEWS
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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