MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewMagicians know never to perform the same trick twice, an aphorism that might have saved Curtis Sittenfeld from attempting a second roman à clef about a famous American first lady ... This may work as an exercise in wish fulfillment for her most ardent admirers. But for other readers, the familiar anecdotes that fill the first section of the novel verge on the tedious. Why repeat Hillary’s famous 1969 speech at her Wellesley commencement, or the stories about meeting Bill at Yale Law School? Sittenfeld’s imagined life for Bush worked so well because we never knew the real one. Not so this time around — because Hillary’s life is so well known, parts of Rodham feel slow and stale ... Sittenfeld is a smart, funny writer. She is often best when she places her characters in cringingly embarrassing situations ... Sittenfeld writes convincingly about Hillary’s political ambitions. She draws revealing scenes that expose the terrible double standard that women candidates face, the microscopic attention to their looks and dress ... The crisp, insightful voice Sittenfeld creates for Hillary reminds me of the writing in What Happened, Hillary’s memoir about the 2016 campaign ... Sittenfeld genuinely gets Hillary, plumbing how her youthful idealism fades as she confronts the realities of politics ... I don’t know if Sittenfeld ever met the real Hillary, but in Rodham, she paints a post-Bill life for her that seems perfectly plausible, one that becomes richer with the passage of time. But as good as the final third of the novel is — especially the chapters when Hillary runs for president, complete with a rollicking cameo by Donald Trump — it never recovers from those early pages, where Sittenfeld is still tethered to her character’s real biography
Bob Woodward
RaveThe Washington Post\"At a moment when feverish talk of presidential impeachment dominates the political discourse, Fear is full of Nixonian echoes ... Fear is an important book, not only because it raises serious questions about the president’s basic fitness for the office but also because of who the author is...His utter devotion to \'just the facts\' digging and his compulsively thorough interviews, preserved on tape for this book, make him a reliable narrator. In an age of \'alternative facts\' and corrosive tweets about “fake news,” Woodward is truth’s gold standard ... these days Woodward’s flat, reportorial tone seems like the perfect antidote to the adversarial roar on Fox or Twitter. The authority of dogged reporting, utterly denuded of opinion, gives the book its credibility.\
Katy Tur
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewBy the end of Unbelievable it’s clear how wrong they all were in thinking they could run over 'Little Katy' ... Unbelievable offers a vivid sense of how threatening Trump’s personal insults can feel ... The more personal story Tur tells in Unbelievable is also compelling. Her parents were daredevil journalists in Los Angeles, hanging out of helicopters, sometimes with their daughter in tow ... Unlike two other recent books about the 2016 election, Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which focuses on the dysfunction of the Clinton campaign, and Devil’s Bargain, by Joshua Green, which dissects the relationship between Trump and his Svengali, Steve Bannon, Tur’s account has no juicy insider details. It doesn’t say anything new about Trump and appears to have been dashed off. I found the narrative hard to follow. The chronology is purposely jumbled, jumping back and forth from the frenzy of election night to the rest of the campaign and then weaving in short takes from Tur’s personal life. Navigating through the book can be confusing. But one subject that Tur richly examines is the outrageous sexism of Trump and many of his supporters ... Unbelievable does capture the competitiveness within network television. Tur recounts her understandable disappointment when she was cut out of coverage of an NBC presidential debate.
