PanThe Spectator (UK)Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through Giuliani before donating it to Oxfam. This is not just any old biography – it’s a 480-page character assassination ... Many Americans thought Giuliani was a sort of hero on 9/11 – so that requires revisionism, as far as Kirtzman’s thesis is concerned. He all but accuses the mayor of having blood on his hands because the Twin Towers firefighters were using defective radios ... By this point the biography has dispensed with facts in favour of its political objectives. For instance, Giuliani’s children aren’t born; they leap out, like Athene from the head of Zeus, during the ‘revolting spectacle’ of his divorce. What was he like as a father? Who cares! You think this is a life of Giuliani? ... Hang on a ding dong minute, I frowned. Isn’t this book written by a journalist? Here’s Giuliani, with a career history of exposing corruption at the highest levels, alleging ‘the national security apparatus of the American government was lying, and that Biden was a criminal sitting on millions of dollars in bribes’. So I did a little Googling. Turns out Kirtzman was a journalist; now he has his own strategic communications firm. So that’s why the book reads like it was ghostwritten by a political consultant for the Biden administration.
