Fire and Fury

It took me a while to get my hands on this one - I was watching the scandal around its release, and laughed my butt off when the publisher scorned Trump's threats and published it early instead. My copy finally came in at the library, and I've been reading it off and on for the last couple of weeks. I normally read books far faster than that, and it's not a long book, but I kept having to set it aside for numerous reasons.

It could have benefited from more thorough editing - between a couple of typos, some odd grammar, and a phrase being repeated twice in the same sentence (I think the sentence may have originally been broken across two pages, so no one realized, and then in the final formatting it was all together) - it definitely had some technical problems.

It was also just infuriating. Especially the beginning, where so many of the campaign staffers don't think Trump SHOULD be president, but still campaign for him because it's impossible that he could win, so what does it matter if they don't think he should? That was incredibly frustrating to read.

Honestly there wasn't a lot in this book that I didn't already know, but I've been following politics pretty closely since early 2016. If you haven't, and you're looking for a good way to get up to date on current American politics, this could be a pretty good place to start. (Don't stop at this book, though, there's a lot that it doesn't cover.)

I can't say that anything really surprised me. Everything sounds like what I've come to expect from this administration. The book is decent, but anything terribly salacious from it has been pulled out and splashed across the news at this point, so if you've been paying attention, I don't actually think it's worth spending your time on. It's certainly not the groundbreaking INSIDE LOOK THAT NO ONE'S SEEN HURRY AND READ IT that it was advertised as.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Accept it for what it is.... A gossipy, tabloidish, and often slapdash account, albeit one with a lot of access to Trumps White house and senior staff. Its a fun read but it's main utility is to enable an open discussion of stuff that more serious reporters have known for ages but have not been able to attribute to specific people... That Trump is a petulant, narcissistic child who nobody respects.

This read like a Bannon commissioned hit piece. It had salacious moments, but they were all teased out already. Major events in the first year were completely glossed over. The health care bill is only mentioned in passing. Feels like the book was wrapped before anything happened with tax reform. Pence is for all intents completely non-existent in this book. Same for Mnuchin and Mattis. Spicer isn't even that large a figure. Sarah Huckabee Sanders isn't even mentioned.

My guess would be that Steve Bannon had a significant hand in pushing this out. It paints Jared and Ivanka in an incredibly bad light.

The insight into Katie Walsh and Gary Cohn was interesting. I honestly didn't know too much about them.

Interesting enough. I admit it feeds into my perceptions of Trump, but if even half of this is true, it's insane.

Fact check of it: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/jan/09/fact-checking-read-fire-and-fury-michael-wolff/ (Some of the inaccuracies could probably be chalked up to the rushed publication, others not so much.)