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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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