Reviews

THE GOOD GIRLS
An Ordinary Killing
By Sonia Faleiro

In 2012, a gang of men set upon and horrifically raped a female student on a bus in New Delhi. The crime made international news and provoked national protests that led to some changes in the laws. But Indian women with big dreams were on notice anyway. Seven years on, the Indian National Crime Records Bureau logged an average 88 rape charges a day.

Sonia Faleiro set out to examine India's rape culture, but what she ended up revealing was something even more mundane and terrifying.

Read the rest here.

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AIRMAIL WEEKLY-

Since the day in 2015 when Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and started blaming "Mexican rapists" for national problems--and then sent his ex-N.Y.P.D. private-security goon onto Fifth Avenue to beat those who protested--people have been comparing him to Adolf Hitler. And in the more than five years since Trump launched his appeal to white identity, the Trump-Hitler comparisons have only grown louder and more common, from social-media memes to op-eds.

They are not wrong: one can simply go back and watch his rally performances in black and white with the sound down to be reminded of 1930s Germany. But, critical as it is of the president, the mainstream media has been reluctant to go full-on Adolf when covering Trump.

Now comes New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat with a convincing, scary, and very readable book making the case for Trump as not Hitler exactly, but as an American of the same ilk, a member of a small group of malignant men (and they are all men--that's part of the point) that, in addition to Hitler, includes Italy's Benito Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi, Congo's Mobutu Sese Seko, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, Chile's Augusto Pinochet, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary's Viktor Orbán--and now Trump

Read the rest here.

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NBC THINK - Lawsuits, nondisclosure agreements and emotional or financial blackmail kept the lid on the secrets of Trumpland for years. But the political career of President Donald Trump, a self-described billionaire, has brought an increase in attention. Now as more and more insiders bust out their own books, Trump and his attorneys are playing an increasingly wild and desperate game of whack-a-mole to keep dissidents, including some very close to home, silent.

In "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Most Dangerous Man," officially released on Tuesday, Trump's niece, Mary Trump, becomes the first family member to openly break ranks but only the latest of many critics to face threats for doing so.

Mary Trump's book is the literary equivalent of an ambulance siren.

Read the rest here

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For Airmail Weekly

Totally Under Control, a new documentary that traces the American response to the coronavirus crisis, is not easy to watch. First, we already know the ending, and second, headlines over the past six months gave us a play-by-play of the unfolding disaster in real time.

We think we know how we got here--some combination of bad luck, bad governance, and bad timing. But the fog of chaos--deliberately and maliciously deployed, as this film, directed and produced by Alex Gibney (Enron, The Inventor), Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger, makes perfectly clear--obscured the gravest official, purposeful malfeasance in the history of modern American government.

Read the rest here.

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For Airmail Weekly

Will the days of women's rage ever end? The selections in this voluminous collection remind us that generations have been issuing fiery demands for a more equal, post-patriarchal world long before the mass movement known as #MeToo sent Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein to jail and ousted many other powerful men from their jobs.

Breanne Fahs, author of a biography of the radical feminist Valerie Solanas, here connects us to the hive mind of resisting women and their comrades in arms.

Read it here.

Trial narrative

Nina Burleigh, AM'87, covered Italy's Amanda Knox case and the global obsession with the beautiful "female monster."

"Foxy Knoxy," the Italian and British media call her. Voted the 2009 Woman of the Year in an Italian television-news poll, Amanda Knox, then a 22-year-old University of Washington undergrad on a year abroad in Perugia, was also labeled a "luciferina" and a "dirty-minded she-devil" by a Perugian prosecutor, in his closing statements during her trial for the murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. Convicted in December 2009, Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison and immediately filed an appeal. Her conviction was overturned October 3.

read the rest here

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"Entertaining and Evocative."

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: President Trump's wives and daughters languish--and, occasionally, thrive--in luxurious bondage to his ego, according to this gossipy group portrait. Newsweek writer Burleigh focuses on six women of "Trumplandia" and their relationships with the billionaire: his grandmother Elisabeth, from whom Burleigh speculates he got germ phobias and racism; his mother, Mary, who bequeathed him her tacky, extravagant tastes; first wife Ivana, whom he divorced for evolving from glamorous trophy wife to hard-headed businesswoman; second wife Marla, who bridled at the glamorous trophy wife image; current wife Melania, content as a glamorous trophy wife but, Burleigh suggests, humiliated and morose over Trump's womanizing and her awkward first lady role; and daughter Ivanka, who gives a classy, insincere polish to Trump's callous politics. Burleigh's narrative is dishy fun, replete with fashion and decor, fights, sex scandals, Trump's incomparable boorishness (whether he's publicly upbraiding a wife or bragging about his daughter's sexual allure), and wry, catty prose. (She describes a postbreakup Marla "appearing in public shorn, in flat shoes, without makeup, like Joan of Arc heading for the pyre.") Burleigh's amateur psychoanalysis and insinuations that these women have sold their souls to become Trumpian "brand extensions" can seem facile, but her account of life in Trump's gilded cage is entertaining and evocative. (Oct.)

KIRKUS REVIEW

"A comprehensive expose that will engender strong reactions ... "

A veteran reporter offers an in-depth investigative report on the six most important women in Donald Trump's life and then branches out to explain how a few dozen other women have affected his path to the presidency.

Some of the results of Burleigh's (The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, 2011, etc.) extensive research have been revealed previously in Newsweek, where she is the national politics correspondent. Combining shoe-leather reporting in Europe as well as the United States, official documents, secondary sources, and informed speculation, the author provides separate chapters on each of the six women: Trump's grandmother, an immigrant from Germany; his mother, an immigrant from Scotland; his two immigrant wives, from Czechoslovakia (Ivana) and Slovenia (Melania), and his American-born wife, Marla Maples; and his eldest daughter, Ivanka. Burleigh rarely employs neutral language or on-one-hand/on-the-other accounts. Rather, when the evidence warrants it, she labels Trump a liar, manipulator, cheater, and misogynist. The author acknowledges that her opinions about Trump "leak through" on some pages, but she offers no apologies for what many readers are likely to find refreshingly straightforward language. Regarding Trump's grandmother and mother, both deceased, Burleigh summarizes their influences on Donald as hygienic (hence his germophobia) attempts at instilling propriety and--in his mother's case especially--a drive for a royal lifestyle. The author gives credit to Trump's grandmother for her business acumen despite Donald's efforts to erase that legacy from official family histories. In the epilogue, Burleigh discusses the relationships between Donald and his two low-profile sisters; between Donald and his lower-profile daughter, Tiffany; among Donald and five mostly loyal, talented Trump Organization employees; and among Donald and various mostly consensual mistresses as well as 11 of the 19 women who have accused him of sexual assault.

A comprehensive exposé that will engender strong reactions from the vast majority of readers regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

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Many American correspondents in the Middle East start out with an attraction not just to the adrenaline but to the exotic. They fall a little bit in love with the mullah's wail in moonlight and the scent of cardamom, even if the scent is tainted by shallow graves and the prayer calls punctuated with the sound of gunfire, off in the distance.

As a journalist on this turf, Sulome Anderson is sui generis. Not only is she both American and Lebanese, and so immune to the exotic; she is also the daughter of Terry Anderson. In 1985, while he was the Associated Press bureau chief for the Middle East, Terry Anderson was kidnapped and spent almost seven years in captivity, long before ISIS was a gleam in some mullah's eye, when hostage taking -- not beheading -- was deemed by militant Islamists and their affiliates to be sufficient to sow fear in the enemy.

Read the rest in the New York Times Here

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The Trump administration has just devoted much of its first 50 days writing and then re-writing a contentious immigration ban that is supposed to make America safer. Meanwhile, a hurting nation awaits triage that has nothing to do with Muslims or Mexicans. As Trump himself well knows, small towns and rural areas from coast to coast are in dire economic straits, challenged by lost jobs and an opioid epidemic.

Brian Alexander's devastating new book, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town, explains how the enemy is already within our borders--and no immigration ban could have protected us. In fact, some of them are advising the Trump administration.

Alexander, a journalist, grew up in Lancaster, Ohio, in the 1960s. The town, home to Anchor Hocking Glass Company, was so prosperous in the 1940s that Forbes magazine devoted a cover story to it as the all-American town, crowning it, as Alexander writes, "the epitome and apogee of the American free enterprise system." As Forbes saw it, the town and its company worked in perfect harmony.

Life in Lancaster was indeed sweet. When Alexander was growing up, his father worked at the glass factory, which had been pumping out ware since the turn of the century. He recalls a Norman Rockwell-mythic place of happy, healthy children, unlocked doors, prosperous parents and good schools. But starting in the 1980s, financial Darth Vaders came swooping down from Wall Street and started manipulating the company in order to squeeze cash out. Over the next two decades, two of Donald Trump's advisors, corporate raider Carl Icahn, and then private equity king Stephen Feinberg, tore into the company's books, manipulating its stock, forcing it to take on debt, and slowly chopping it up like a Thanksgiving turkey, picking the bones clean and leaving the town without its core industry.

Read the rest here

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New York Times Book Review 11/03/17

ORIANA FALLACI
The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend
By Cristina De Stefano
Translated by Marina Harss
Illustrated. 282 pp. Other Press. $25.95.

Someone should write an opera about her: La Fallaci, beautiful, extravagant, courageous survivor of war and tempestuous love affairs, speaker of truth to power. But for now, Cristina De Stefano's new biography of the Italian journalistic superstar Oriana Fallaci -- unabashed hagiography to counter the writer's late-life reputational demise -- must suffice.

Full review here.

THE NEWCOMERS
Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom
By Helen Thorpe
396 pp. Scribner. $28.

Steve Bannon, we hear you. Too many white middle-class Americans, victimized by globalization, are struggling. Resources are scarce enough for people who were born right here.

Build the Wall! Build the Wall!

But maybe Americans are not as flinty a race as we appear to be when we're chanting at rallies. While President Trump was campaigning on the wall, Helen Thorpe spent a year inside a "newcomer class" for teenage refugees from Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central America.

Her resulting book, "The Newcomers," is a delicate and heartbreaking mystery story, as Thorpe slowly uncovers the secret catastrophes in the lives of young immigrants at South High School in Denver. They arrive mute, and they gradually gain the words and confidence to describe the journeys that led to the classroom.

Thorpe's parents emigrated from Ireland in 1965, when Thorpe was a year old, and she has written about young Mexican immigrants in America. A discerning chronicler of cultural misunderstanding, she started the book just as nativist resentment became a political movement.

Read the rest at the New York Times here.

The 2007 murder of 22-year-old British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, captured the world's attention because of the woman eventually convicted of killing her: 20-year-old Seattle native and fellow student Amanda Knox. Burleigh (Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt) examines the intertwined lives of the students and the media circus surrounding the trial in this powerful example of narrative nonfiction. In July 2007, Knox moved into a house shared with Kercher and two older Italian women. On November 2, Kercher was found with her throat slit in her bedroom, and Knox and Raffaele Sollecito--whom she'd started seeing only a few days earlier--were first on the scene. Giuliano Mignini, the notoriously tough Perugian prosecutor, charged them with murder, adding their acquaintance Rudy Guede when evidence placed him at the crime scene. The protracted trial was awash with what Burleigh describes as faulty forensic evidence and testimony that was more rumor than substantiated fact, but Knox was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison; she is appealing her conviction. Burleigh, who parses how the Knox trial was perhaps tainted, still presents a fair and unbiased portrait of a girl adrift in a foreign legal system and a culture rife with preconceptions about young American women, 15 b&w photos; 2 maps. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly Starred Review of The Fatal Gift, here.

Read the Daily Beast Review of The fatal Gift of Beauty here.
04/04/08

Trails of Tears

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A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE
Rediscovering the New World
By Tony Horwitz
Henry Holt. 445 pp. $27.50

Travel journalism is a lot like traveling salesmanship -- lots of windshield time, bad food and people who really don't want to talk to you. Tony Horwitz gamely forges on, without a limo or tour guide waiting at the airport. He rents his own cars and drives himself to the nearest saloon or hardware store in search of a loquacious local, who then becomes the reader's tour guide as well. For Horwitz, this serendipitous working style means subjecting himself to the vicissitudes of Third World car rental and roadside diner food, the boredom of the American highway and the torments of thin-walled motels. For readers, it unearths some gems. Continue Reading on The Washington Post
11/07/07

Votes and Vows

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For love of Politics
Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years  
By Sally Bedell Smith 
Random House. 572 pp. $27.95

There's a bedtime story for girls of a certain age. It's called Hillary and the Horrible, Ghastly, Unconscionable Secrets and Lies of Men. We've heard it before, but somehow we never tire of it. The moral is that men find women less attractive in direct proportion to the strength of our careers. Every last one of our husbands might run off with the babysitter. To blunt a biblical fact of life -- men are different from women, and some are more different than others -- we like explanations that lay the blame for Bill Clinton's infidelity at least partly on his wife. A successful wife to Bill Clinton would have had to be a full-time, full-service, round-the-clock succubus, but that doesn't give Hillary a pass. Continue Reading at The Washington Post
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Every decade or so, a young, very smart, often photogenic woman comes along and produces a book that identifies an ugly fact of female life in America. Susan Brownmiller, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi have all contributed to this canon. Now attempting to join them is Ariel Levy, who presents us with the problem of the moment: young women eagerly participating in their own degradation by dressing, acting and physically remaking themselves as though Hugh Hefner owned the rights to their bodies. Continue Reading at The New York Observer
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Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor
by Rick Marin. Hyperion, 284 pages, $23.95.

Everyone knows that Manhattan is filled with women who can status-check in a nanosecond. A flick-of-the-eyes subway scan tells them if the shoes are Prada or knockoff, how much the purse cost, whether the highlights came from Anna Wintour's latest salon pet or the storefront Jean Louis David colorist. Continue reading at The New York Observer