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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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