RaveThe Washington Post... the book is far more extraordinary than even the life of Smedley Butler ... The book thus affords a compelling and insightful meditation on the trauma people still feel as a result of Butler’s career and the American ambitions it represented ... Katz sketches an insightful comparison between Butler and his almost-exact contemporary Franklin Roosevelt.
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
PositiveThe Washington Post... the authors illustrate key aspects of Trump’s threat to democracy ... Even if you already know the outlines, the details — many of which have already found their way into the press — deepen one’s sense of how serious, even global, that danger was and how thoroughly Republicans enabled it ... The strength of any Woodward book is its inside sources, but this reporting serves different purposes in each part of Peril. In the Trump half, hair-raising anecdotes show the 45th president behaving much as one expected, or a bit worse. In the Biden half, Woodward and Costa paint, for the first time, a clear picture of how the 46th president operates and what he hopes to achieve in the aftermath of Trump ... here the book is most illuminating: Biden regards the -ism, not the man, as the real threat; Trump put the nation in peril because he evoked and organized a darkness that was already there. And his behavior is more shocking because it serves no purpose greater than salving his own obscure hurts; he is no historic visionary but simply someone who wants the perks of the presidency ... As rich as the book is, it leaves some vital stories untold — for example, the 20-day delay by General Services Administrator Emily Murphy, under evident political pressure from the White House, in releasing funds lawfully allocated to Biden’s transition team and giving its members access to federal agencies.
