Critiques
The book begins with the relationship he had with his father. A wealthy man who also dabbled in real estate in New York City to make his fortune, Donald quickly learned at the feet of the master. Greatly surpassing his father in accumulated, tangible assets, Trump wheeled and dealed using the infamous lawyer Roy Cohen to help sue his way to the top. The art of bombastic personality and the never ending need to deflate and defame those who do not agree with him has sadly landed him a conflicted person who makes it known when he does not agree with the way he is treated, never minding the way he treats others.
I won't make this review a political statement. I read the book to learn more about Trump and how his personality developed. This was a good reference.
The author, Michael D'Antonio doesn't try to make a comparison of each President's earliest days, but he does remind readers that both men were busy, each clearly with a different focus. Few of us will need to be reminded that on the Home front, Obama's initial focus was on trying to prevent the Country from going into a full recession and to turn the economic downturn around. Like Trump, another early Obama focus was on Health Care, trying to implement universal affordable health care insurance for Americans, trying to prevent individuals with significant health issues from being dropped by their insurer, and allowing young adults to remain on their parent's policies until they were 26. Following passage of the Affordable Health Care Act (ObamaCare), Obama turned his attention on environmental issues. While he took steps to try to protect rivers and streams from pollution, and to prevent pollutants being discharged into the air, his signature accomplishment (as seen by his supporters) was his leadership and negotiations with major industrial nations to complete an agreement by virtually every Nation in the world to set goals to reduce carbon discharges into the atmosphere to limit the impacts of man-made climate change in the future.
On the international stage, I would have expected Mr. D'Antonioto would have highlighted the Obama Administration's finding and killing of Osama Bin Laden as a foreign policy accomplishment, but I don't remember that being addressed. The author did address other uses of armed forces under Obama though. Obama tried to de-emphasize America's involvement in foreign wars, substituting use of armed drones to take out key terrorist leaders vs. more troops on the ground. He also tried encouraging NATO nations and/or foreign leaders in war zones to take a more active role in their own affairs. However, as the current state of affairs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, etc. point out, finding suitable partners to provide effective fighting forces to defeat terrorist forces has been a difficult task.
Also on international matters, Obama did break down the isolation barriers with Cuba, and along with other major Nations, negotiated a deal with Iran to stop uranium enrichment programs and progress toward nuclear weapons proliferation. He also worked to shift American interests toward the Pacific region and negotiate Pacific oriented Trade agreements, but these may not be lasting achievements going forward under the current Administration.
All in all, the author provided a good review of the more significant accomplishments achieved by the Obama Administration. Supporters will have their opinion, and opponents theirs, but only history will tell whether these Obama domestic and foreign policy accomplishments will be enduring or short-lived, beneficial or folly.
High Crimes: The Inside Story of the Trump Impeachment by Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner takes a close, detailed look at the events which led up to, and the hearings, during the trial. Both award-winning authors are seasoned journalists who spent a lot of time within House committees.
I have to hand it to the authors, they took a book about procedural, meetings, and laws and created a page turning thriller out of it. To be fair, they had lots of help from a cast of characters that it seems were taken right out of a comedic caper movie.
High Crimes: The Inside Story of the Trump Impeachment by Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner attempts, and succeeds, to navigate the enormous amount of information to tell a fascinating, easy to read story. More importantly, the authors managed to separate the truth from the mountains of disinformation being put out by state and non-state actors, in official as well as unofficial roles.
The effort put into this book in an attempt to tell an accurate, even handed chronicle of an event, which under every other administration would have dominated the headlines for months. Being that it’s 2020, the impeachment seems so far away that it’s not even making rounds in campaign ads.
The authors stuck to the facts, good or bad, and have been backing them up with sources so one could check themselves. This is not a complimentary book on the Trump administration, but it doesn’t go out of its way to make him look bad either, but they do use his own words to clarify their many of their points.
As someone who makes an effort to stay current on the news, I know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing landscape and distinguish between facts and disinformation coming from authoritative sources meant to muddy the water. I certainly don’t have the time to dig through unfiltered data, true and not true, as well as to turn it into information – this book does that.
The authors walk the reader through the events that led up to the decision to impeach, as well as the impeachment process and its aftermath (if you can even call it that). They use transcripts, documents, and testimonies to build up the narrative, staying away from hearsay and innuendos.
Finally, I’d like to stress that I didn’t think this book was a “hit piece” on any one person or part – I do not appreciate such products and feel they hurt the country and democracy. The authors, wisely I believe, stayed away anything they couldn’t support and from giving opinions until the epilogue. The book reads like a comedy, an unbelievable chain of events that if didn’t actually happen, would be difficult to believe
One thing really stayed with me after reading this, so much that I had to do a little research to see if anything had changed after nearly 30 years.
As of this moment, Richland High School still uses the Bombers nickname, and yes, the mushroom cloud logo is still very much in use. Even after so many more years of bad news and upsetting information about what was done at Hanford. In 2020. Man. . .
Overall an excellent book. There were some baffling spelling errors though. Astronaut Gene Sirnan? Really?
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Susan.Macura | 1 autre critique | Oct 10, 2018 |
Susan.Macura | 1 autre critique | Oct 10, 2018 | 
I found it very informative, but not at all in the dry way that most expect a book on the history of science would be. It wasn't a text book of dry facts, but the history of space exploration and the race between the US and Russia to advance their technology and blast into the future of space travel. It portrayed events from both sides of the race, which brought more of the history to life for me than a more one sided telling would have.
I would say that fans of space exploration and science fiction will love reading and learning from this book as much as lovers of history and technological development will. I could not be happier that I found this treasure hidden away in the non fiction section of my library.
As you can see from the above list, his agenda was long and varied. The author says that Obama has been unappreciated and I agree. America used to be the majority of the people in the center politically speaking but now the centrists and people willing to compromise have greatly shrunk. The author traces the evolution of the opposition party and how their goals and tactics have changed. Now the United States is more divided politically than in a very long time. because of the The next president will need to deal with that situation.
This book is great if you believe in the changes that he was bringing and trying to bring about but I was a little disappointed in the lack of the personal side of Obama. My feeling is that he will be thought of as a great president as time passes and history puts him in perspective.
I received this Advanced Reading Copy by making a selection from Amazon Vine books but that in no way influenced my thoughts or feelings in this review. I also posted this review only on sites meant for reading not for selling.
Bei mir blieb am Ende ein unbefriedigtes Gefühl., Zu viele spannende Fragen bleiben komplett im Dunkeln. Wie kommt es, dass intelligente Menschen auf dieses Großmaul hereinfallen können? Welche Rolle spielt dabei "die andere Seite", also die aufgeklärten, liberalen Kräfte, die Intellektuellen usw. und jene die sich dafür halten. Das Phänomen lässt sich meiner Meinung nach nicht auf die im Buch geschilderten Zusammenhänge reduzieren.
Dennoch: lesenswert!
I first tried to get a measure of the author's bias. I thought maybe he was neutral or since Trump had agreed to interview with him maybe leaning to the pro. I learned however that there was little if anything good he had to say about him. Not bashing him with enthusiasm like so many do, but more relating the many flaws in an almost matter of fact way. And taking this on face value maybe that is all one can surface in the man, Trump.
I was left with an impression of can a guy like this with so many perceived negatives by so many seriously win the Presidency? And I have to say no. But then again this is Donald Trump and he often does win, but that is in business. Politics, though businesslike at times is, well politics.
D'Antonio gives a profile on Trump in a quick manner skipping through his formative years through his career and personal relationships. For some reason at the beginning and the end he delves into detail on a number of real estate transactions that I found rather boring reading. Yet much of what Trump is about, as even he would tell you in glowing terms of course is his gift at deal making. In large measure he has succeeded in this, but his failures, and those left in the wake of these failures are indeed notable.
I finished the book as uneasy about how I should view Mr. Trump as I started it. What I think I know as probably many feel they do about him is here we have a man so focused on his self worth and success firmly rooted in his embrace of positive thinking that nothing can possibly stop him in his quest for whatever. On this course he feels it also necessary to stake his territory bombastically by dismissing and often denigrating those who oppose him or stand in his way. For him this formula seems to work or at least he believes it does. If nothing else it gets him the attention he so seems to crave. Whether it will work on a national political scale we have yet to see.
Trump seems to feel that his mastery of getting the upper hand in any deal is sufficient to take on the enormous complexities of a treacherous world stage in which questions of security and economic gravity present themselves nonstop, day in day out. Much is staked on image and in thinking of Trump as a Presidential figure, Bill Clinton comes to mind.
In any event the book was worthwhile in trying to get a better grasp on what this man is about. The emphasis is on trying, as with Donald Trump it may be impossible to define what really drives the wheels.
Unfortunately he died and the juggernaut cracked at the seams. The Orphans School was the sole owner of the Hershey stock and as such reaped much more money than they could ever spend. The board wanted to break the trust and sell the stock which tore the town apart. Not a fitting ending, which could have been prevented by some smarter planning on M.S. Hershey's part. Stay tuned.
I learned so much and found the book to read like a novel. Dense with facts, it never bogged down or became overwhelming. I thoroughly enjoyed it and now want to visit to see for myself what so many others have enjoyed.
And yes, it’s first and foremost subject is O’Malley. His life from childhood (he grew up being a Giants fan!!), his years at Culver and Penn. How he build his enormous network and, most importantly, how he became the owner of and ran the Dodgers organization.
There is some baseball action, but it’s not the main business of this book. If you’re interested in the Dodgers and their rise under O’Mally’s ownership, you should read it. It can be a bit dry at times, but you know where it’s heading and once you’re in the late 1940’s the story unfolds before your eyes.
D’Antonio describes Brooklyn, the Brooklynites, Ebbets Field and the players with an eye for detail and you almost see yourself in the stands at Ebbets, rooting for Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Duke Snider and all the other Boys in Blue.
It’s essential history for Dodger fans who want to know more of their team, the time before Los Angeles, how the process of moving the team went. O'Malley was often seen as a money grabbing owner, but the fact is he tried and tried to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.
How did the spring training stadium at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, come by the name Holman? Did you know that the Angels really were an LA team before the Dodgers came to town? These and many more facts can be found within the pages of this well written book.
The book starts with the launch of Sputnik I, a tiny piece of hardware that amounted to little more than a ball with a radio transmitter. D'Antonio then takes the subsequent events in more or less chronological order, detailing the combination of fear, admiration, hysteria and indifference that Americans displayed in response to this Soviet achievement. D'Antonio puts the Sputnik I launch into historical perspective, but also details how Stalin sought to leverage it for public relations and why the Eisenhower administration's response, at first, seemed to be little more than a yawn. Taking events more or less in chronological order, the book then describes the Soviet follow up to launch the dog Laika in Sputnik II and points out the huge consternation caused by the now little-remembered fact that Laika's trip was, from its inception, a one way ticket to the dog's demise. And D'Antonio details why the U.S. government's response to Laika's fate was muted, due to its own use of animals in aircraft and rocket testing. But where the story really gains traction is when D'Antonio recounts the bitter feuding between the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy over which service would take precedence in the U.S. space effort, and Eisenhower's determination that the primary U.S. effort should be civilian, and not military in nature. Focusing on outsize personalities like the egotistical General Bruce Medaris and the officially sanitized ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun, the story shows how unfocused and haphazard U.S. efforts were, and how this inter service conflict served to hinder U.S. efforts, and diminish the civilian NACA (National Committee for Aeronautics) at a time when it should have been pushed to the forefront.
D'Antonio assembles a collection of impressive resources, ranging from government documents to media reports, and interviews with a wide variety of people who were involved in the early U.S. space program, from those intimately connected with the program, to reporters who covered it, to those who were only tangentially involved by being at the right place at the right time. Some, such as the reports of Bradford Whipple, among the first to hear Sputnik I as it orbited the globe, and who was involved in a strange clandestine theft of Sputnik I from the Soviet pavilion at the world's fair, or the accounts given by Cocoa Beach resident Roger Dobson whose family owned a trailer park where many of the early rocket engineers who worked on what would become Cape Kennedy made their homes give a very human feel to what could have been a story dominated by political infighting, cold war paranoia, and engineering reports. Others, such as Jay Barbree, a reporter in the Florida area who covered all of the rocket launches serve to give a perspective on the media response to the repeated U.S. failures, and the handful of triumphs. Among the more interesting elements of the book is the information concerning Wernher von Braun's past as an SS officer directing the construction and use of the V-2 rockets in World War II, and the efforts made by the U.S. government to sanitize and hide his past and true involvement in war crimes (and the involvement of many of the other German rocket engineers brought to Huntsville, Alabama to work on rockets for the U.S. Army). Even with the perspective of fifty years distance, it seems almost shocking that a man who was directly responsible for selecting concentration camp inmates to work as slave labor to build missiles could have his image rehabilitated to such an extent that he would appear in Disney specials espousing the wonderful future that space travel would bring to the U.S. populace.
The most important element of this book is that it covers a time period in U.S. history that is cloaked in nostalgia and recounts it with all its glories and flaws with an unflinching eye. Sweeping away the nostalgic vision of a happy America presided over by the grandfatherly Eisenhower, D'Antonio recounts how Democrats such as Lyndon Johnson jumped at the chance to score political points at the expense of a seemingly out of touch Eisenhower (whose health problems, including a minor stroke, went unreported). Also breaking up the idyllic view of the era is the treatment of women and minorities (despite most of the rocket research being done in the South, minorities are almost completely absent from the book, and oddly, one of their strongest advocates is ex-Nazi von Braun). Most accounts of the U.S. space program, such as The Right Stuff, more or less begin with Project Mercury, with NASA already an established fact, and the rocket program already well on its way. A Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey, in contrast, ends with project SCORE, an unmanned launch of an Atlas rocket intended to do little more than show that the U.S. could throw four thousand pounds of payload into orbit just after NASA had been created, but before it had actually pulled together all the elements that would eventually make up the space agency (including von Braun's rocket research group, explicitly blocked from joining NASA by the Secretary of the Army). The account in this book, demonstrating the repeated and frustrating failures to even successfully fuel some of the rockets that the U.S. expected to use to get itself into space puts into perspective the truly brilliant triumphs of the later years, and how it seems almost a miracle that there were no human fatalities on any of the launch vehicles until Apollo 1. Reading this history makes it seem almost amazing that only twelve years separate the fitful and halting efforts described in this narrative and Apollo 11. Anyone interested in the history of the U.S. space program should read this account of its painful birth of NASA and first feeble steps taken on the path that eventually led to the Moon.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.
1 StormRaven | 2 autres critiques | Jul 21, 2010 |
StormRaven | 2 autres critiques | Jul 21, 2010 | Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.
The effect of Sputnik on the United States was electrifying. I was about 10 at the time. As it happened, we were on the 2nd and last year of our sojourn in Germany where my father was researching at the University of Heidelberg. The effect there was minimal, but from what I’ve read since, everyone in the U.S. was horrified at the pity shown to the United States, now clearly in a distant 2nd place. There is no doubt it had a substantial impact on the presidential election in 1960 along with the non-existent missile gap.
The author begins with Soviet initiatives, but most of the book, which covers but a year up through 1958, is devoted to American political in-fighting and initiatives. It was former Nazi rocket scientists like Werner Von Braun(1) and his German colleagues who created their own little enclave near Huntsville, Alabama, that gave the U.S. an edge.
Aside from the interesting technical details, D’Antonio provides a broad picture of life in the fifties and especially the cultural changes that were wrought by enormous sums of money poured into places like Cape Canaveral and Huntsville; places that had been mere backwaters exploded into rapidly expanding subdivisions with concomitant increases in real estate values.
Sputnik had enormous policy and cultural implications and changes. Soon, in the guise of protecting America from the Red Menace, every group imaginable from the NEA and National Science Foundation, to politicians who wanted more money for their districts, to weapons manufacturers, to the Air Force and Army at loggerheads on which service was to control missiles, was clamoring for huge increases in the federal budget for their projects. Articles in the press naively drawing on PR the Soviets were putting out, talked about Russian nuclear trains, ships, airplanes and satellites. So, not only was there a missile gap (ironically thanks to the U-2 Eisenhower knew this was a chimera)(2), but a science gap, and education gap, a you-name-it-gap, and anyone who suggested otherwise had to be a Commie. People who formerly had been unalterably opposed to federal support for local education, now changed their tune and bellied up to the trough. Eisenhower was in a touch position. He warned of the military-industrial symbiosis, but the political pressure from both sides was just too much.
In the meantime, rocket launches at Cape Canaveral were beset with all sorts of failures, some spectacularly public, others seemingly mundane. In one case, because some special paper had been loaded backwards into the printer, the results appeared to be the opposite of what was good, and the missile was destroyed fearing it would go off course or explode uncontrollably.
PR became crucial in the battle between the Army, Air Force and later NASA for control of rocketry. Eisenhower was anxious to have civilian control of space, while the military and people like Edward Teller were anxious to dominate the Russians using military control of space. The perception was the Russians were ahead and they clearly had more powerful rockets, but that dominance vanished quickly. This was the time of Public Relations. Edward Bernays had revolutionized how we view control of consent and his book Crystallizing Public Opinion and Engineering Consent became bibles of the industry. I will have to read them.
It’s astonishing today to see what they got away with in the fifties in the name of science. Project Argos, for example, exploded low-yield high altitude nuclear weapons in space to determine the effect of radiation on all sorts of things, but the main objective was to study the Christofilos Effect hoping that it would be possible to protect against a Soviet nuclear attack by exploding nuclear bombs high over the Pacific. The idea was to create a barrier of electrons that would fry the electronics of Soviet warheads and possibly also to blind Soviet radar to a U.S. counter-attack. I suppose one could argue the tests were a great success because we learned it wouldn't work. It was all terribly secret, of course.
A truly fascinating look into the culture and history of the U.S., and to some extent Soviet, space race.
(1) Hunt, Linda. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990. St Martins P, 1991.
(2) Beschloss, M. (2016). Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 affair. Open Road Media.
Jacobsen, Annie. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America. Little, Brown, 2014.