PositiveAir MailModest in scale. It’s less a work of scholarship than the kind of tightly argued, crisply written policy brief Washington insiders might flip through on their charter flights to Aspen ... It won’t be comfortable reading. Applebaum is unsparing in her criticism of Western elites for enabling the rise of anti-democratic forces ... Applebaum reserves particular contempt for those American leaders who insisted that information technology would help make the world safe for democracy.
Steve Coll
RaveAir MailVoluminously researched and compulsively readable.
Richard White
RaveAir MailCombining a prosecutor’s zeal for uncovering evidence with a crime novelist’s flair for suspense, White shows that Stanford died from ingesting strychnine ... Exactly who gave her the lethal dose is the book’s central mystery, but far from its only revelation. The unsolved murder of the college’s founding matriarch, it turns out, is integral to understanding how Stanford eventually became one of the world’s great universities ... White makes a compelling case for why Jordan and the university’s trustees would want to be rid of their overbearing benefactor. But there were other suspects who also had strong motives ... The mystery is only solved—satisfactorily, if not definitively—in the final pages of White’s book.
Jeremy W. Peters
PositiveNew York Times Book Review[A] spirited new history ... The outlines of the Republicans’ hard-right turn are by now largely familiar. What distinguishes Insurgency is its blend of political acuity and behind-the-scenes intrigue. Much of the book’s opening material revolves around the first national figure to channel the base’s anger: the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin ... Peters is a fluid and engaging writer, and as the narrative of Insurgency unfolds and Trump inevitably, irresistibly, assumes center stage, you almost can’t help admiring — as Bannon did — the candidate’s raw, demagogic genius ... Luridly fascinating ... Anecdotes like these make Insurgency worth reading, though it’s harder to say who would want to. The book contains too many examples of Trump’s manifest flaws to appeal to MAGA true believers, but not enough revelations of outright criminality to satisfy veterans of the #resistance.
Craig Whitlock
RaveAirMailEven for those familiar with the ebbs and flows of the conflict...Whitlock’s book reveals new depths of Western folly ... What Whitlock delivers...is a clear-eyed, clinical indictment of members of the country’s military and political establishments, who, year after year, continued to issue upbeat and patently false assessments of a war that many privately conceded was lost ... The inescapable, if depressing, conclusion one draws from The Afghanistan Papers is that it couldn’t have turned out any other way.
Eric Lichtblau
PositiveAir Mail...[a] brisk, Netflix-ready new book ... Lichtblau imbues Freddy’s action sequences with satisfying, propulsive energy, while occasionally widening his focus to a cast of supporting characters ... What’s missing from Lichtblau’s otherwise deeply reported account is a stronger sense of the motivations and inner lives of these young men, who dropped behind enemy lines, adopted new identities, and risked everything on behalf of a country, America, they still barely knew ... With the current U.S. administration intent on narrowing the definition of who can count themselves as American, it’s worth recalling, and celebrating, how immigrants like Freddy Mayer once helped the United States save civilization. Who knows when we might have to do it again?
