PanRolling StoneFrom the Ground Up belongs to the Fuck You: How I Became a Billionaire and You Didn’t genre that has an oddly persistent market in America ... Because it’s also designed to double as an extended stump speech, it’s a particularly difficult read — the boring and insincere autobiography of a pretentious oligarch who probably hasn’t been told to his face he’s full of shit since the first Bush administration ... The Starbucks origin story is a Freudian horror flick, though Schultz doesn’t tell it that way ... Once you get past the somewhat interesting \'avenging my loser Dad\' portions, the rest of the book is just collections of clichés lifted variously from the campaign-lit and CEO-bio genres. Schultz’s mind is a giant T-shirt ... exceptionally dull, so completely devoid of ideas that it’s almost interesting. Schultz makes the Romney family cookbook read like Dante’s Inferno.
Seymour M. Hersh
PositiveRolling Stone\"Hersh\'s career is a tribute to the pursuit of the \'unpredictable result.\' We used to value reporters who were willing to alienate editors and readers alike, if that\'s the way the truth cut. Now, as often as not, we just change the channel. This has been bad for both reporters and readers, who are losing the will to seek out and face the unpredictable truth. When it comes time for the next generation of journalists to re-discover what this job is supposed to be about, they can at least read Reporter. It\'s all in here.\
Michael Wolff
PanRolling StoneA quick note about Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, which upon a second pass still has, to put it mildly, some serious issues: As any art historian can pick out a forgery, veteran journalists reading this book will quickly spot an oversold narrative and perhaps unprecedented sourcing issues ... In fact, trying to follow Wolff's idea of what 'off the record' means or does not mean is like trying to follow the hands of a three-card monte dealer. It just can't be done ...a Primary Colors-style novel about what goes on behind various closed doors in the Trump White House, based on a few bits and pieces of fact... However, as Bannon points out in the book – correctly – Trump by now is so firmly entrenched in the consciousness of America's intellectual elite as a villain that he will never be accepted by that crowd ... The result is an insane paradox of an America led by a doomed and trapped psyche ... Anyway, it's a fascinating book. But too long for most people in the Internet age to actually read.
