Unbelievable is an insightful page-turner of the most un-presidential president ever and his campaign for the White House. Tur proves to be as good a writer as she is a political reporter. Her writing is sharp, her sentences short and crisp, her humor, through it all, intact ... With Unbelievable, Tur offers a perceptive, entertaining and, yes, disturbing ringside account of history, both for today and for posterity's sake.

By 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.

It reads like it was written for her colleagues on the trail, full of insidery reminiscences, professional self-doubt, last-second flights, lousy hotels and gossip about which NBC News embed was making out in a garage with which CNN staffer. Yet what elevates Unbelievable beyond one more pedestrian campaign memoir is Tur’s skill at capturing the constant indignities of campaign reporting while female, including the worst indignity of all: enduring the fixation of Trump himself ... Tur’s imagery is occasionally overdone but she has a knack for breaking down characters and moments ... Tur is memorable on the contrivances and idiosyncrasies of television journalism ... Deep into the book, Tur recalls the advice of a longtime television journalist, who managed to remain professional on air no matter how angry or tired or sick he felt. 'No one cares,' he told her. 'The news is not about you.' Those words stayed with her, she writes. 'I can hear him in my head now, prodding me.' I hope she keeps listening.

...a just-right mixture of journalism lunacy, road warrior angst, determined reporting, and unflinching ambition ... Throughout Unbelievable, Tur professes wonder at how her flimsy one-off assignment covering a never-was presidential hopeful morphed into must-see-TV. And she allows readers to glimpse her insecurities and ambition, sharing the mini-dramas of losing a plum spot on the nightly news or seeing a colleague land a coveted story, all while sacrificing friendships, family, sleep, and stability, among other things.

Tur takes an inspired approach to telling a story that we just finished living through — at least from our view in front of the stage. She slingshots back and forth between accounts from the long campaign to the minute-by-minute ticking clock of Election Day itself. The stomach-clenching suspense is unexpected ... The author’s storytelling is earthy and accessible, and helps us to laugh through some of the otherwise truly chilling episodes she recounts of Trump’s whipping up his crowds against the 'lying, disgusting' media ... Tur proved her mettle during a long and painful campaign, surviving that and much more — not the least of which was Trump’s grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing her, apparently because he liked her relatively softball coverage of him moments before on Morning Joe. Unbelievable.

...a rare look at the grueling toll a national presidential election campaign can take on the journalists whose job it is to cover the daily — sometimes hourly — developments reported in our voracious 24-hour news cycle … Tur has written a very personal, funny, and candid memoir that not only reveals a lot about a courageous TV reporter, but also helps us better understand how Trump got elected … Tur structures her book with a series of fast-paced alternating chapters set in various campaign events and encounters juxtaposed with hour-by-hour accounts of election night. The format is slightly jarring at first, but it quickly begins to make sense as the book takes on a cinematic quality, combining entertaining flashbacks with the hours leading to the foreboding climax we all know is coming.

In her introduction, Tur says about the Trump phenomenon, 'I won’t try to explain. I will just tell you what I saw.' And this becomes frustratingly true, as the book goes on. This is a travelogue through Trump ’16, and it only covers what Tur covered herself. There’s very little about policy issues, Hillary Clinton, even behind-the-scenes campaign backstabbing. What the book does well, however, is capture the blur of a campaign and the buffeting of journalists’ personal lives. Tucked within the well-trod territory is the book’s strongest element: the disturbing on-site reports of how deep the hatred ran at the rallies. Tur communicates how shocking it was to see ordinary people become unleashed in crowds, calling Clinton the c-word, or even screaming 'assassinate the bitch.' She writes about what it feels like to need private security and to have a Trump supporter spit in her face, and that resonates powerfully. A thin but very personal first draft of history.

Trump’s anger, page after page of it, is discomfiting, and Tur’s reactions to it seem to verge on symptoms of PTSD. Even so, her own back-of-the-envelope analyses are borne out by subsequent events, as when she writes, 'Trump is crude, and in his halo of crudeness other people get to be crude as well.' A thoughtful account of covering what the author rightly calls 'the most unlikely, exciting, ugly, trying, and all-around bizarre campaign in American history.'

While Tur recalls many of the campaign’s unusual moments (Trump defending his penis size in a presidential debate; his hawking of steaks and bottled water at a press conference; the Access Hollywood tape) Tur’s narrative is light on political analysis, and it mostly avoids the central question pundits will be exploring for years to come: how did Trump actually win? But Tur's brisk behind-the-scenes account humanizes the press corps, illuminates life on the campaign trail, and delivers on its promise: 'I won’t pretend to explain it,' Tur writes, but 'I will tell you what I saw.'