Title: Fear: Trump in the White House Author: Bob Woodward
Read copy: eBook (Kindle)
Published: September 11, 2018
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ASIN: B075RV48W3
THE INSIDE STORY ON PRESIDENT TRUMP, AS ONLY BOB WOODWARD CAN TELL IT
With authoritative reporting honed through eight presidencies from Nixon to Obama, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump’s White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.
Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president’s first years in office.
My rating:
Released on the anniversary of the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil that spurred the "War on Terror", effectively destabilizing the Middle East and causing one of the largest human tragedies in the world, this book deals with a growing disaster that not only involves the U.S., but the entire world as well.
This book shows us the aftermath and consequences, some that we knew about and some that were kept a secret until now, of putting a childish, entitled, narcissistic, incompetent, selfish, tantrum-prone sociopath with a short attention span and apparent learning disabilities into one of the most important, powerful and pivotal roles in the world.
“The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”
(Reince Priebus)
“I don’t care about any of that.” [...] “I don’t give a shit about that.”
(Donald Trump)
It feels strange to say I liked a book like this one, but I did. I loved the journalistic narrative style of short, concise sentences, and of reporting facts without getting into speculation, gossips or rumors (as another author quite failed to do earlier this year). Maybe it is Woodward's clout as an investigative reporter, maybe it's the fact most of the revelations in this book weren't that new, but I believed it (I'm also not part of the blinded base, so that probably helps) and I'm sure that if push came to shove, Mr. Woodward had more than enough evidence to back everything up despite constant denials (which only make things worse, if you ask me).
And then there's the tempo. The pacing is important no matter what you write or read; be it an article, a puff piece, a novel or a non-fiction book. And Mr. Woodward (unlike the author of the book that came out at the start of the year) has the pacing and tempo down pat. Except for a few passages here and there involving military strategies and positions, this non-fiction book was quite a page turner. A train-wreck you cannot help but be drawn to and watch to see what happens next.
It reads like a thriller, a piece of fiction, which, I guess, paints a sad picture of the world we currently live in.
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