Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Matt Taibbi is my number one favorite campaigning journalist and political commentator, never afraid to expose chicanery, hypocrisy and sleaze under every rock he kicks over. His writing just gets better and better: most of ICP is not just laugh-out-loud funny, but is so on-the-money it occasionally had me rolling on the floor with laughter and crying “Yes! Yes! He’s nailed it!” At the center of Taibbi’s insightful series of essays on the 2016 election campaign and its aftermath is the larger-than-life figure of Donald Trump (“a figure of almost supernatural shallowness…destined to be buried under a mountain of outlandish promises, in the process leading thousands of hoodwinked followers off the cliff of history”), but the book is not just about the new POTUS. Taibbi absolutely nails the cast of characters in the GOP’s ‘Clown Car’ – the 2016 prospective candidates including Trump - but also under scrutiny are the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, HRC’s insipid, uninspiring campaign (“an overconfident and incompetent ruling class that was ten miles up its own backside when it should have been listening to the anger percolating in the population”), the political beltway bubble and how it works within unwritten boundaries now shattered by Trump, and the US news media to which Taibbi belongs which is “becoming more and more indistinguishable from entertainment media” and at whose door, above all, Taibbi lays the responsibility for getting Trump elected in November. One caution: if you’re a RS reader and follow Taibbi’s regular pieces, you may have read many of these essays during 2015 & 2016 in print or on the RS website. However, there’s new stuff here as well. The long introduction and shorter epilogue for example offer a prescient if depressing summing-up of our current political landscape, how we got here and where we might be headed. So despite the fact that much of ICP has already been published as RS articles by Taibbi, the book as a whole tells a story so coherent, so concise and so entertaining, all in Taibbi’s inimitable literate and comic style, that it can be unreservedly recommended.