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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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