... a valuable and riveting historic document ... Hill’s personal, professional and political lives form a coherent whole so that each part illuminates the other ... For the British reader, Hill’s memoir makes for sobering, sometimes shaming, reading. Without self-pity, she makes it very clear that her background imposed huge disadvantages on her ... The last part of her book is a passionate argument for the removal of the structural disadvantages that hold back the poor in Britain and the US. When I finished...I was left with one remaining mystery. Why did she do it? Many of Hill’s friends in Washington would have warned her against working for Trump ... On this, Hill is frustratingly taciturn ... a memoir that will give pleasure to readers today—and will be an important document for historians of the future.
There Is Nothing for You Here...weaves together...two selves, slipping back and forth between the unsentimental memoir reflected in its melancholy title and the wonkish guide promised in its inspirational subtitle. The combination, however unlikely, mostly works—though by the end, the litany of policy prescriptions comes to sound a bit too much like a paper issued by the Brookings Institution, where Hill is currently a fellow. When recounting her life, Hill is a lucid writer, delivering her reminiscences in a vivid and wry style. As much as I wanted more of Hill the memoirist and less of Hill the expert, I began to sense that giving voice to both was the only way she could feel comfortable writing a book about herself ... Hill recounts [her family hisotry] with immediacy, tenderness and a good bit of gallows humor ... she has plenty to say about Trump. Instead of making the usual insider-memoir move of fixating on all the brazenly outrageous behavior...Hill notices his insecurities, the soft spots that, she says, made him 'exquisitely vulnerable' to manipulation ... Hill the expert points to heartening examples of benevolent capitalism at work. But Hill the memoirist knows in her bones that the neoliberal approach, left to its own devices, simply won’t do.
... a mixture of icy rage and black humour ... Her description of the wrenching de-industrialisation of the Thatcher era, and the poverty and crimped horizons it engendered, is poignant, too ... when writing about her own country, Hill’s fair-mindedness slightly deserts her ... Britain’s ladder of social mobility was rickety, but—as she is at pains to acknowledge—not completely broken ... Her account of those chaotic years [with Trump] contains few revelations ... The book’s most powerful message is that the price of economic alienation is democratic decay. Her pithy recommendations about how to mitigate class disadvantage—mentoring programmes, hiring benchmarks, targeted recruitment and so on—should be required reading for decision-makers.
Unlike other tell-all authors from the Trump administration, she isn’t obsessed with the scandalous. Much like her measured but riveting testimony in Trump’s first impeachment, the book offers a more sober, and thus perhaps more alarming, portrait of the 45th president. If Hill’s tone is restrained, it is damning by a thousand cuts. It lays out how a career devoted to understanding and managing the Russian threat crashed into her revelation that the greatest threat to America comes from within ... Much of her new book expands on [her] personal journey, a story told with self-deprecating humor and kindness.
There is plenty here about the craziness of life in the Trump administration and Hill has a knack for capturing the absurdities of the court of King Donald ... While other Trump-era memoirs have focused almost solely on the carnival, Hill’s scope pans out to the wounded country that put him in office, and then wider still, across the Atlantic to Britain and then across Europe to Russia ... It is an analysis that has been laid out by others before, but what makes it particularly compelling here is that it is intertwined with a unique life story of a working-class English woman who ended up sitting across from, and cooly observing, the preening 'strongmen' of our age. Where Hill is most provocative is in her warnings that having centuries of democratic experience will not necessarily protect us from Russia’s fate.
... ambitious and personal ... Hill’s insights into the Trump White House...reaffirm more than they reveal ... she is never entirely clear about why she went to work for an administration she had openly protested ... Ever the wonk, Hill suggests national programs, private-sector efforts and philanthropic initiatives to strengthen school systems, bridge digital divides, remove racial barriers and reduce the male-female wage gap ... It is all solid, reasonable stuff—a longtime Brookings Institution researcher, Hill cannot resist citing its studies—but she lapses into her own sloganeering ... If not groundbreaking in her prescriptions, Hill is still perceptive in her diagnoses ... simple passages, grounded in experience, prove memorable.
Hill makes a convincing case that populism can slide into authoritarianism if citizens and leadership are not vigilant and demonstrates similar political outcomes throughout the world ... Readers interested in Hill's life and in international relations will be well informed by this book; her reporting of behind-the-scenes activity in the Trump White House will also fascinate.
Hill takes an almost anthropological view of her time in the Trump White House, observing the behavior and attitudes of colleagues as if they were subjects in a social experiment. The result is a sobering analysis of the toxic environment Trump and his aides created and how it continues to threaten democracy’s very existence.
... lucid ... She examines personal mobility and wage inequality through the lenses of place, class, race, and gender, and makes a forceful argument for investing in education to lower the barriers to opportunity ... Readers will come for the insider details about Trump, but stay for the keen analysis.
In this ambitious, immensely compelling memoir, Hill interweaves her interesting life story with events and issues she has continued to observe during her career ... The author persuasively argues that America may be heading in a similar direction to Russia unless we address the crucial challenges facing much of the country ... A shrewd, absorbing memoir that casts a sharp eye on America's future while offering feasible solutions for change.
