Joseph Stecher

Nurse Woodward and RP McTrumpy

Revisado: 02-04-23

The first half of the book is like listening to a male nurse gently humoring an Alzheimer’s patient who thinks he is President, but is not and never was. What we perceive as Trump’s famous evasions and myopia when served in sound bites and tweets are transformed to disjointed rambling when served in a series of one hour conversations. Half way through the book COVID hits and Woodward tries - and fails - to use his access as the author of a book on Trump to persuade Trump surreptitiously to bring the full force of the US government to help people. But beyond one-off grand gestures that he alone can make - closing the border, accelerating the vaccine funding - Trump lacks the focus, empathy, and organizational skill to put in place a proper regime of masking, isolation, and testing and of adjacent policies like access to housing and revisions to agriculture and food distribution that better run countries did, and as a result many more Americans died as a percent of population than was the case in other rich countries. We picked him, and he killed hundreds of thousands of us. Woodward occasionally interjects to speak directly to the listener, and at the end asks us not to make the same mistake again.

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Dystopian novel along the lines of The Testaments and Children of Men.

Revisado: 01-29-23

Your heart will break. Like Testaments, a story of resistance. Like Children of Men, our current political and social ills extended to distant but believable extremes in a way that forces you to acknowledge how close we are to the awful world described. It reinforced my own commitment to my small contribution to today’s resistance. Definitely a departure from Ng’s suburban dramas, but the same brilliant voice and the same mix of familial pain and love. Thank you, Celeste. Will be looking for #4 when you’re ready.

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Waiting for volume II !!!

Revisado: 01-08-23

Well researched and written from the perspective of Constitutional Law and History. Your frustration will be that the book was published in 2018 before the Mueller report, January 6, or either of Trump’s impeachments and failed convictions in the Senate. I’m dying to know what the authors think today about those events - though they do anticipate some of the outcomes. It was like reading a portion of a Greek tragedy or a dead sea scroll where the rest of the work is lost: you won’t know the conclusion unless the rest of the work is found. The authors wisely and persuasively suggest putting aside the fantasy of impeachment coming to save us from Trump and Trumpism, and instead point toward real activism- knocking on doors, voting, contacting elected leaders, reading real news (and not performance activism on twitter) - to bring about change by bringing the country together. My only quibble is that activism must focus first on driving from power white supremacist antidemocratic autocrats, and only then can progressives harness the power of government to end voter suppression, address climate change, and end social and economic injustice to bring the polity back together. The voice reader faltered a bit because he gave equal and ponderous weight to every word. Maybe he was intimidated by the authors and the subject. Not sure I’d have been less intimidated though - I mean… it’s Laurence Tribe’s words.

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Like a poem

Revisado: 01-01-23

Rigorous research. Life experience. Structured as a random wander around the South. Told in a gorgeous voice (author and reader both) like a poem, like Faulkner, like “100 years of solitude”. A window into the being black in America and a call to action. At one point she makes a reference to “piecing together this book” and she has done so brilliantly. Thank you, President Obama, for making this one of your 12 books of 2022 which is how I learned about it (on @post I think.

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Great Epilogue

Revisado: 08-27-22

Andrew Weissmann is a great American and public servant, and an extremely skilled lawyer and investigator. Someone - his agent, his editor, his publisher, or the author himself - must have told him that an actual historical analysis of his experience would bore readers and not sell, and that instead he should write a sort of first person detective story where we look over Weismann’s shoulder and listen to his feelings during his 22 months of investigation, ultimate betrayal and disappointment. Two problems: first, most readers already know what happens, so the detective story is a bit flaccid, and second, Weissmann is a terrible writer. Almost every page is an all you can eat buffet of mixed metaphors and clichés. The epilogue, on the other hand, is extraordinary. Weissmann is back on his home field laying out his case for what the office of Special Counsel did right, and where they stumbled - including a heartfelt takedown of Trump’s Autocrat General, Bill Barr. He then lays out a cogent and realistic series of reforms for future special counsels, concluding that our Democracy is cherished, fragile, at risk, and redeemable if we work. I wish he’d expanded the epilogue to be the book, and that he’d saved his feelings and clichés for the epilogue. A better writer might have crafted a political noir ending with Mueller himself saying, “Relax, Jake, it’s Chinatown” when the Trump Thugocracy springs their trap and misrepresents the counsel’s findings, but Weissmann is not that writer. So skip to the epilogue. It’s great.

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Enjoyable but like a copy of the Atlantic with different versions of the same story over and over

Revisado: 08-17-22

Fun and you will laugh out loud periodically. Suffers from same flaw that I see with most journalists who write a book - magazine articles are about pith, a hook, and to some extent meeting a deadline. A book, on the other hand, ought to have a long arc, rich and various. Leibovitch hits the same arch note hour after hour, forcing narrator Barrett into a very small box. In the very last chapter Leibovitch cites Zelensky and the Ukraine resistance as examples of true leadership and courageous patriotism in sharp contrast to Trump and his beer belly brown shirts (my metaphor, not his), but in the reading it feels like Leibovitch used current events to add shape to what was otherwise a one-note chronological ordering of different versions of the same magazine article over and over. But if you like a catalogue of Trumpian buffoonery you will be amused - especially if you spread the chapters over many many weeks.

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Sincere Conservative with a Blind Spot

Revisado: 05-14-22

This author is decent, sincere, and knowledgeable, and an exceptional writer. He sets out to give an overview of Conservative thought since 1920, and succeeds. For those who want to dive deeper, he cites numerous influential books and journals. He describes the tug of war between elitists like Bill Buckley jr (and himself) as opposed to populists like George Wallace and Donald Trump. Some of the core beliefs of the movement are small government and the supraordination of the individual. But the writer has a blind spot. He views racism on the right as an outlier. But if government is small, how can it undo 400 years of racial injustice? And what other mechanism does society have to undo long-standing inequality other than a strong federal government? There is a reason racists are drawn to the right, and that reason is the desire for a weak central government that can’t rebalance the status quo. That is why the author constantly finds himself rubbing shoulders with people whose ideology he sincerely abhors. But fish discover water last. Toward the end of the book, he describes Trump’s bungled efforts to repel the coronavirus without ever noticing that it was Trump’s states rights approach that killed so many (more like every state for itself). And how exactly will a small government battle climate change? If every city and town in America were as safe, unpolluted, and wealthy as Sharon CT, the suburbs of Northern Virginia, and the rest of the world described in this book, the author’s limited government prescription might be valid. But we don’t live in that world, and whether he knows it or not, neither does the author.

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