Written by: John Bolton
First line: One attraction of being National Security Advisor is the sheer multiplicity and volume of challenges that confront you.
Why you should read this book: Usually I don't review books that I didn't finish, but I did slog my way through over four hundred pages of this bloated testament to John Bolton's massive ego before accidentally deleting the file when I got a new phone, so I can tell you that the only reason to read this book is because you are interested in the tedious details and minutiae of foreign policy or the more tedious details and minutiae of Bolton's self-aggrandizing thought processes. I originally started it because I was interested in lurid revelations regarding the president's failures, which are remarked upon, but take a back seat to Bolton's repeatedly stated sense of his own importance and omniscience: he never misses an opportunity to quote, word for word, every single incidence of someone telling him he was right about something between April of 2018 and September of 2019; he never misses a chance to explain why something was Obama's fault, or Clinton's fault, or, occasionally, John Kerry's fault; he never misses a chance to make a snide remark about someone making a mistake ("mistake" being defined as "not doing the thing John Bolton thinks they should do;" he himself only admits to being wrong about anything once in the 400+ pages I read, even though it's abundantly apparent that taking the job of National Security Advisor was a huge mistake on his part); and, most egregiously, he makes it abundantly clear that he's only ever respected three people: Henry Kissinger, Vladmir Putin (!), and (sometimes, on some issues) George Bush Senior. In conclusion, John Bolton is a terrible human being.
Why you shouldn't read this book: You have literally anything else going on in life. I'm not even going to post the link to the actual book, because I don't think Bolton should profit off this crap. I think he should pay the American people for what he's done. The retail price of this book being something like $20 for a hardcover, and having read at least 2/3 of its contents, I really feel like he owes me $13 and some change (in compensation for my pain and suffering; obviously, my copy was pirated because I wasn't going to buy anything that might benefit John Bolton).
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