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It is an irony of our age that a man who rarely reads has unleashed an onslaught of books about his tenure and his time. Dissections of the white working class. Manifestos of political resistance. Works on identity, gender, and migration. Memoirs on race and protest. Revelations of White House mayhem. Warnings over the future of conservatism, progressivism, and of American democracy itself.
As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read just about all of them. In What Were We Thinking, he draws on some 150 recent volumes to explore how we understand ourselves in the Trump era. Lozada's characters are not the president, his advisers, or his antagonists but the political and cultural ideas at play—and at stake—in America.
Just as Trump's election upended the country's political establishment, it shocked its intellectual class. Though some of the books of the Trump era skillfully illuminate the challenges and transformations the nation faces, too many works are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. Lozada offers a provocative argument: Whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, true believers or harsh critics, the books of Trump's America are vulnerable to the same failures of imagination that gave us this presidency in the first place.
In What Were We Thinking, Lozada's selections range from bestselling titles to little-known works, from thoroughly reported accounts of the administration to partisan polemics, from meditations on the fate of truth to memoirs about enduring—or enabling—the Trump presidency. He also identifies books that challenge entrenched assumptions and shift our vantage points, the books that best help us make sense of this era.
The result is an "elegant yet lacerating" (The Guardian) intellectual history of our time, a work that transcends daily headlines to discern how we got here and how we thought here. What Were We Thinking will help today's readers understand America, and will help tomorrow's readers look back and understand us.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 6, 2020 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781982145644
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781982145644
- File size: 2886 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 24, 2020
Washington Post book critic Lozada debuts with an incisive survey of the 150 nonfiction books he’s read “on the Trump era.” Noting the irony “that a man who rarely reads... has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency,” Lozada breaks down the “Trump canon” into insightful categories and concludes each chapter with a list of works discussed. “Chaos chronicles” such as Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury compete for the most “explosive, chyron-ready anecdotes,” Lozada writes, yet often confirm what readers already know. Titles in the “heartlandia” genre (The Forgotten; Hillbilly Elegy) typically reveal more about the authors’ own “prisms and biases” than they do about the struggles of the white working class. And while “Never Trump” conservatives (Jeff Flake, Rick Wilson) push for a rethink of the Republican Party’s methods and priorities, they “fail to reckon with their own complicity in Trump’s rise.” Lozada concludes with a list of 12 books he’s found most helpful in “mak sense of this time,” including We’re Still Here by Jennifer Silva, America for Americans by Erika Lee, and The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin. Readers will appreciate this useful guide to a bookshelf that grows more crowded by the minute. -
September 15, 2020
A literary survey of the wreckage that is the Trump administration. In 2015, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic Lozada carved out a special assignment: reading the books generated by the Trump White House years (and some earlier books, such as The Art of the Deal) to create an intellectual history of the era. "I've read some 150 of them thus far, and even that is just a fraction of the Trump canon," he writes. "One of the ironies of our time is that a man who rarely reads, preferring the rage of cable news and Twitter for hours each day, has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency." The author serves up a readers' guide to a literature that is ever growing--and that will grow further with future memoirs ("Don McGahn, Robert Mueller, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Anthony Fauci rank highest on my wish list"). Some of the books are "insufferable" while others are essential. Lozada lists the top dozen at the end of his meta-analysis, one of them the Mueller Report. Some of the books are less about Trump than about the culture that produced him--e.g., J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, Jennifer Silva's We're Still Here, and Jonathan Metzl's Dying of Whiteness. By Lozada's account, Hillbilly Elegy is less important than Nancy Isenberg's White Trash. There are books of worship and clubby belonging ("most Trump sycophants do not even pretend that Trump should be--or wants to be--a leader for all Americans"), books of qualified demerit (Mueller), books by apostates such as David Frum (who writes that Trump's refusal to take any responsibility for the pandemic is "likely to be history's epitaph on his presidency"), books by worshippers like Newt Gingrich, and, of course, books by Trump's ghostwriters. A nimble overview of the library of Trumpiana, which is likely to grow no matter what the outcome of the 2020 election.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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