Dripping with snideness, vibrating with rage, and gleaming with clarity—a deeply satisfying read.
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by Mary L. Trump ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 14, 2020
The long-awaited tell-all from the president’s niece, a clinical psychologist.
Donald Trump, writes the author early on in this scathing critique, “understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really).” Her account of a night spent at the Trump International Hotel begins with her discomfort at finding her name plastered on every object in the room: “TRUMP shampoo…TRUMP shoe polish, TRUMP sewing kit, and TRUMP bathrobe….I opened the refrigerator, grabbed a split of TRUMP white wine, and poured it down my Trump throat so it could course through my Trump bloodstream and hit the pleasure center of my Trump brain.” As readers will quickly realize, there is a fate worse than having Donald J. Trump as president: being related to him. The author describes wandering around her house in shock the morning after the 2016 election. “It felt,” she writes, “as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.” Few fairy tales were ever colder and greedier than the story of Donald’s father, Fred Trump; the author, who specializes in psychopathology, prefers the technical term, “high-functioning sociopath.” Donald and his siblings were “essentially motherless” from a very early age, and they were subjected to an ongoing form of abuse summarized by the book’s title. But once Donald was tapped as his father’s favorite, he was ushered into the proverbial counting house while his siblings were left to fight for the scraps. The author’s father was repeatedly humiliated and all but disowned, and he was left to die alone. The author’s aunt "wouldn't have been able to feed herself or her son" without Crisco cans of dimes and quarters collected from the laundry machines in the Trump apartments, sneaked to her by her mother. And it goes on, coming to a head in the unbelievable story of Fred Trump’s will. Does Mary Trump, Ph.D., have an ax to grind? Sure. So do we all.
Dripping with snideness, vibrating with rage, and gleaming with clarity—a deeply satisfying read.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982141-46-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | U.S. GOVERNMENT | POLITICS
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Matthew McConaughey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2020
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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