Where is your nonfiction section please.
After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week I barely even want to talk about this madman who may actually be responsible for putting a third Supreme Court Justice on the bench, but I did read two books about him last week. I don't know why I do these things to myself, besides... Continue Reading →
Book review: True Crimes and Misdemeanors, by Jeffrey Toobin That was the whole case right there, stripped to its essentials. Trump didn't care about the people of Ukraine, who were fighting for their lives. (Nor, it was clear, did he care about American laws, norms, or national security interests.) All Trump cared about was the... Continue Reading →
Book review: Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen (Amazon / Book Depository) Journalist and author Masha Gessen lived through the changes of the Soviet Union, including Putin's ascendancy and increasing control over the state media. Gessen’s reported and written extensively about totalitarianism and the relationship of Putin's Russia with the west. In Surviving Autocracy, Gessen turns this... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Threat, by Andrew McCabe (Amazon / Book Depository) Several times throughout The Threat, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe describes a scene in the Oval Office. People called in to meet with Donald Trump sit on small wooden chairs lined up in front of the Resolute desk, "like schoolboys who'd been called... Continue Reading →
Book review: Republic of Lies, by Anna Merlan (Amazon / Book Depository) It's a typically disorienting winter day in an unremarkable part of Los Angeles, the palm trees bristling above the Walgreens and the tire shops, the golden light washing insistently over the slowly rotating sign above a twenty-four-hour burger joint, its paint peeled away... Continue Reading →
Book review: No One Man Should Have All That Power, by Amos Barshad (Amazon / Book Depository) Wherever there is a puppet master, an eminence grise, a Svengali, a manipulator, a secret controller - that is a Rasputin. Author Amos Barshad, fascinated by the shadowy and powerful, started noticing manipulative figures everywhere, from pop culture... Continue Reading →
Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward (Amazon Book Depository) (I keep promising myself I'm not going to read any more of these Trump/White House books but I'm unable to resist, apparently.) Real power is fear. That's the mantra seeded throughout veteran political reporter and one-half of Woodward and Bernstein Bob Woodward's diligently... Continue Reading →
Book review: Lessons from a Dark Time, by Adam Hochschild Book Depository When times are dark, we need moral ancestors, and I hope the pieces here will be reminders that others have fought and won battles against injustice in the past, including some against racism, anti-immigrant hysteria, and more. The Trumps and Putins of those... Continue Reading →
Book review: Them and The Elephant in the Room, by Jon Ronson (Amazon / Book Depository) This book began its life in 1995 as a series of profiles of extremist leaders, but it quickly became something stranger. My plan had been to spend time with those people who had been described as the extremist monsters of the Western world... Continue Reading →
Book review: Russian Roulette, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn Amazon Political investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn (the former the chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo News and the latter the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones) write a thoroughly researched, detail-driven, and rage-inducing account of relations between Trump family, campaign, and administration with... Continue Reading →
Book review: Insane Clown President, by Matt Taibbi (Amazon/ Book Depository) Who knows what will come next, but that's not really what this story is about. "Insane Clown President" instead describes how we got here. Matt Taibbi is one of several journalists who covered the madness of the Trump campaign on the ground and has... Continue Reading →
Book review: Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff Amazon First, I have to apologize for what I wrote in one of my books to anticipate in 2018 posts. I can't believe I even considered NOT reading this book, in light of everything that's happened around it since. To be fair, I think the day I published that... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 