RaveNew York Review of BooksFor anyone who has spent Trump’s second term ranting about spineless Republicans and their lack of fealty to the country’s founding principles, Haberman and Swan offer a useful course in the iron laws of Republican self-preservation ... An entertaining account ... As Haberman and Swan show, Trump in his second term has built a government that, but for a few important exceptions (Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought), is made up of incompetent toadies who are wholly responsive to his wishes.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Ed. by Larry Siems
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewGuantánamo Diary is the most profound account yet written of what it is like to be...collateral damage ... Written in the colloquial if limited English [Slahi] picked up during his captivity...the work is a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish and bitter humor that the Dostoyevsky of The House of the Dead would have recognized and embraced. At its root is a maddening ambiguity born of a system governed not by any recognizable rules of evidence or due process but by suspicion, paranoia and violence ... Slahi’s memoirs are filled with numbingly absurd exchanges that could have been lifted whole cloth from [Kafka\'s] The Trial ... America has crossed a gulf. The steps that took us there were largely secret, but thanks to this and other accounts we know about them now: We know where we came from, and we know where we are. We do not yet know how to get back.
