May was a very busy month with not much reading time, but I did manage to finish a few. Several years ago, I read the amazing story about how Barack Obama’s campaign was run and how it gathered momentum. So, mainly out of curiosity, I read a book about each side of our recent 2016 election. Both books were skewed but fairly interesting. And the one by a former Secret Service UD officer… wow. I tried to balance out the nonfiction with two novels. Wait ’til you hear what I’ve been reading in June! (No more politics.)
It’s always interesting to read insider stories. The writers who brought us Hillary’s biography have now put together an inside perspective of the many things that went wrong for Hillary’s campaign. Scandals, lack of messaging, untaken opportunities, miscommunication, bad decisions: everything can be traced back to the candidate herself. Her campaign just couldn’t catch a break. I have to say that after reading about half of this, I had to start skipping ahead because it was just one unfortunate occurrence after another!
“The campaign was an unholy mess, frought with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary.”
She was unable to prove to many voters that she was running for the presidency because she had a vision for the country rather than visions of power. And she couldn’t cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions and yearned for a fresh approach to governance. All of it fed a narrative of dynastic privilege that was woefully out of touch with the sentiment of the American electorate.”
If the previous book treated Hillary like a superstar, this one labels her a villain. The Secret Service Uniformed Division ranks among the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agencies. Byrne served our country for 29 years with honor and integrity. He gives a firsthand perspective of the Clintons that he states was his obligation to tell the nation prior to election day 2016. If it is all true, “the Bill and Hillary show” is just appalling.
Besides that goal, this book is a memoir of Byrne’s progression through his training and various positions within the Secret Service and the Federal Air Marshall Service. It is fascinating to read his stories about what his job was like.
Character in leadership comes down to two questions: Would you trade places with anyone under your command? Do you hold yourself to the same level of accountability as those for whom you bear responsibility?
With the long-shot goal of selling 20,000 copies, Crisis of Character has sold well over 450,000 copies. Reading it, I have to say (and I can’t believe I’m saying it) that it’s possible we are better off with our current POTUS. I’m relieved the Clinton dynasty is over, at least.
“We’re all searching for something to fill up what I like to call that big, God-shaped hole in our souls.”
DeBartolo is the Founder and CEO of SF Bay Area record label Bright Antenna Records. Knowing that, I can see why this book includes it’s own playlist! This is a love story that left me sobbing so much I couldn’t see the words on the page. Beatrice replies to a personal ad and meets her soul-mate, a writer and seeker of life. Their story is at once juvenile and touching. It does make you wonder if some people are meant for each other.
“I suddenly thought my life was perfect. Or, at least, more perfect than it had ever been. It was as if all the melancholy I’d ever known, all the nights I sat alone thinking life sucked, had added up to our place in the world—finally a good place—and the spirit of that rightness was meant to echo on until the end of time.”
Three sides of a triangle weave together this story: rare landscape by a female Dutch painter in the 1600’s, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it as a struggling Australian grad student.
As she unpacks the camera obscura, it strikes her that she has never painted exactly what she sees. Surely, this is the way of all art. The painter sees the world as if through the watery lens of a pond.
This book is well-written with likable, relatable characters and gorgeous detail. Highly recommend.
You carry grudges and regrets for decades, tend them like gravesite vigils, then even after you lay them down they linger on the periphery, waiting to ambush you all over again.
This book is quite obviously slanted, but I was very curious about how and what made the Trump campaign so successful. I found it fascinating to read about Trump’s ability to engage people with big-picture ideas and to tap into their distrust of career politicians and anger toward Washington. I did not know that Nixon was his long-time advisor or that he’d been interested in running for President since the 70s, waiting for the opportune time.
Just as Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes, and Gary Byrne write that Hillary’s failures can be sourced directly to the candidate herself, Stone writes that “Donald Trump is his own strategist, campaign manager, and tactician, and all credit for his incredible election belongs to him.”
