I’ve been working hard to take down my backlog of books to read, and have now finished two more.

1) Trump’s: The Art of the Deal.

Other possible alternate titles for this book would be “How I financed my projects at others’ expense using  tax rebates and other tricks”, and “How I used PR to get what I want.”  Reading this leaves you with the slightly nauseous feeling that you have after talking to a slimy used car salesman.  A lot of what was stated left me with the feeling that relevant facts were being omitted.  I’d like to see a fact checking “Coles Notes” for this book, and to look at how the projects that are named in the book are doing now.

I am inclined to enumerate all the people that Trump mentions in the book and dig into the relationships that Trump took the time to name drop in this book.  Trump’s pedophile buddy Epstein didn’t make the cut in the book, but Adnan Khashoggi did. A lot of the other names I didn’t recognize.

EDIT: here’s some backstory on the book.  Included in that article was one more interesting name drop, Roy Cohn, Trump’s lawyer.  That name may have been mentioned in the book, but if so, I didn’t recognize it when I read that part of the book.  With Epstein’s case reactivated, I now recognize Cohn’s name from Whitney Webb’s writing [1], [2] and her interview with Pierce Redmond.

2) Dan Brown’s: Deception point.

This book would be a lot better as a movie. Like a lot of Michael Crichton books, this one moves very fast, but is pretty shallow, as well as predictable and probably forgettable.  I did enjoy it, but it’s definitely not one to keep, and I intend to bring it to the second hand bookstore, or if they don’t want it, to the communal take-or-leave a book shelf at the recycling depot.

References

[1] Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case

[2] Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era