This book and its variants, e.g. "Donald Trump: Master Apprentice", Simon & Schuster, 2005, are essential sources of reliable data on Trump and his family for anyone who is seriously interested in the mogul's earlier life. Gwenda Blair follows the professional historian approach in terms of breadth and thoroughness, Notes for the latter book alone cover 59 pages and the index is 11 pages. That helps make up for the strictly narrative style of the book, which doesn't provide tabular chronologies or other reader-helpful features. I give it five stars in spite of big gaps in treatment because of the importance of a credible, systematic biographer for Trump history at a time when his controversial status has launched and will launch books with hype, distortion and bias of various kinds. In my working papers analyzing his campaign and a current study nearing completion I have learned that claims about Trump need to be carefully checked. The Washington Post has published excerpts from a comprehensive book on Trump scheduled for publication in August. However, because of the intense revulsion of the editors and key writers at the Post for Trump, I think it is fair to conclude that though the book will reveal new unflattering background on Trump it is unlikely to be objective and give accurate coverage of sensitive issues like his successful manipulation of the media. As New York senior writer Frank Rich pointed out in an insightful article in September 2015, Trump's campaign "made monkeys of the pundits and pollsters" and will have a permanent effect on U.S. politics.
Trump's open acknowledgment of his plan (in "Crippled America", 2015) to gain publicity by making outrageous statements, his books. and previous support for Democratic politicians and policies were all either neglected, ignored or deliberately submerged by the entire U.S. media including elite newspapers and the PBS News Hour until after the New Hampshire primary in February 2016. Many experts and columnists still assume that Trump's flamboyant statements represent his real positions. Only a few insightful political columnists like Mark Shields and Dan Balz have grasped the fact that Trump's essential freedom from ideological commitment means that in a number of areas he has been able to show "xray vision" in seeing through the fog of stereotypical arguments and controversy and gain insight into deeper realities of U.S. politics.
Blair does not get into analysis of Trump's business strategies and political policies. Trump books in 2000, 2011, and 2015 are almost exclusively devoted to the latter. Interested persons can check out my earlier working papers for preliminary reviews of these topics, URLs for which are listed in my Trump blogs at [...]. In the future that blog will reference a forthcoming major Social Science Research Network working paper on how Trump's campaign exploits weaknesses in U.S. society.
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Interesting and very readable biography of a family. I'm ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2015