Witty, dogged and often sobering analysis ... I can’t say I was always gripped by Setoodeh’s consideration of individual seasons of The Apprentice ... But what’s fascinating here is how effectively Setoodeh demonstrates that Trump is still drunk on celebrity nostalgia.
Setoodeh did what he could to gather material ... But access — especially when it comes to a 20-year-old reality show built around voluble people who crave attention — can yield only so much ... He tends to quote his subjects more than he needs to, so that choice lines are swamped by banal ones. The dullest parts of the book are his interviews with Trump ... The most bizarre tidbits in this book never coalesce into something more interesting than the obvious Alice in Wonderland-style madness suggested by the title.
