Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Meet Rachel Klein. It’s her last day on the job in the White House. She works in the fictional White House Office of Presidential Correspondence. There, Rachel uses Scotch tape to reconstruct the documents President Donald Trump rips up and tosses into the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes You might pick up Tina Nguyen’s memoir, The MAGA Diaries, expecting a confessional, a mea culpa. I did. But that’s not the book she wrote. As Nguyen makes clear at the outset, “I never became a true believer and cannot profess to be one.”...
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What? Another book about Donald Trump? I’ve already reviewed nearly two dozen of them. So, what could possibly move me to read another one? Well, three things, as it turns out. First, author Mark Leibovich is one of the funniest observers of American politics I’ve come across in recent...
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Many of the thousands of books about Donald Trump that have seen the light of day in recent years—Amazon lists more than 30,000—were written by people with an axe to grind or a reputation to restore. Not so the latest of Bob Woodward’s twenty-one books, Peril, coauthored with fellow...
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If it’s too early for a post-mortem on the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s publishers haven’t gotten the memo. Amazon lists 642 titles in response to the query “books about the COVID-19 pandemic.” The pandemic still rages on, filling hospitals in heavily impacted states...
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The phrase “nightmare scenario” in the title of this rushed exposé of the Trump Administration’s response to COVID-19 has a double meaning. It refers, of course, to the pandemic itself. Not the worst case scenario like the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed an estimated 50...
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Here is the story of how America lost its way and came to elect a man who rejected democracy itself. For nearly half a century, the broad-based liberal consensus that grew out of the New Deal produced robust economic growth, rich corporate profits, and an expanding middle class enabled by a...
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Amazon lists more than 1,000 books about Donald Trump. And only two US Presidents—George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—account for more (over 2,000 in each case). But Trump hasn’t even completed a single term in office, and there are lots more books to come. One of the latest, and in its...
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Here’s America’s leading scholar of Right-Wing politics with an up-to-the-minute analysis of the contending forces that have seized hold of the Republican Party. Because, as UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Rosenthal explains in Empire of Resentment, conservatism comes in many flavors, of...
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Carl Hiaasen sure knows how to lead off a story, and he proves it all over again in a savage takedown of Donald Trump. “On the night of January twenty-third, unseasonably warm,” he writes, “a woman named Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons went missing during a charity gala in the exclusive...
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Christopher Buckley is far and away the most accomplished political satirist writing today in America. In novels such as Thank You for Smoking and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, he has skewered the nation’s political establishment six ways from Sunday. Now, for the first time in nearly...
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It’s a little hard to believe that anyone could write a satirical story about Donald Trump, whose behavior is so far over the top that he would seem immune to satire. Yet that’s exactly what San Francisco literary phenomenon Dave Eggers has done in The Captain and the Glory. Unlike...
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His father was arrested for failure to disperse from a Ku Klux Klan rally. He was also investigated for profiteering by the U. S. Senate and the State of New York and sued by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations. His son-in-law’s father spent fourteen months in Federal...
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The same “Senior Trump Administration Official” who famously wrote a disturbing Op-Ed in the New York Times (“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” September 5, 2018) has pulled out the stops in A Warning. In fact, his new book reads much like some...
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Robert Kuttner has been helping set the progressive agenda for three decades as the cofounder and (current) coeditor of The American Prospect and as a cofounder and board member of the Economic Policy Institute. So, it’s hard to think of anyone better qualified to make the case for electing...
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Let’s get real. What the news media and the pundits call populism these days is actually something more familiar to European historians. It’s fascism. And it’s high time for Americans to recognize that. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the politics of the Trump...
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Its title is Night of Camp David, but the publisher topped off the cover with a teaser page to emphasize the novel’s relevance to the madness in Washington today. “What would happen if the President of the U.S.A. went stark-raving mad?” the teaser reads. The implication is that...
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What does government do for us? Do we really need it? What happens if government ceases to do those things? These are the questions Michael Lewis comes to grip with in his powerful little book, The Fifth Risk. By drilling down into the day-to-day realities in a handful of little-recognized federal...
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Here comes Bob Woodward’s new book with the latest wrinkles in the tangled story of Donald Trump and his conduct in the White House. It might seem that everything of note has already been said. But Woodward demonstrates his journalistic chops in this meticulously researched account. Fear is...
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Recent news reports suggest that a North Korean nuclear attack is distinctly within the realm of possibility. And this new novel makes clear how it might actually happen. I grew up under the shadow of the nuclear umbrella. And, no, I wasn’t the least bit reassured that that umbrella was...
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Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.