Fire And Fury

It took me over a year to finish this book, not because it was hard to follow or used difficult language, but just because the feeling of suffocating doom would drive me away from continuing. Finishing it now over a year since its publication date I can see that we have a little better knowledge of the details of what happened, and a bunch of additional of other misdeeds surrounding this administration have taken their place in the public consciousness, but at the preset moment it still feels just about as hopeless as it did then. Perhaps we are a little closer now to the removal of the great blight at the top of the pyramid, not just the players immediately below, but it seems clear that we have done a great harm to our civil structures and to our society itself which will not be undone if and when we manage to turn this band of evildoers out. At the time it was written we didn't have nearly as much insight into the foreign involvement in meddling with the election and with supporting influence groups with foreign money.
People complain that this book is not a work of proper journalism, with sourcing and fact checking and everything that discipline holds dear. It is more like a set of notes from an embedded reporter, who may have been told some lies, but who also could see the context of the narrative being put out, so it has its own special claim on how it can inform the public. It does not spend much time at all talking about where these characters came from, what motivated them to participate in the acts of this administration, or speculate much on what kind of image they had for the country they were working to create. I expect that future historians will have major programs devoted to understanding what happened around the 2016 election and what kinds of lasting effects it has left. There isn't a large amount of discussion on what the effect has been on foreign allies and adversaries; it concentrates more on what was happening in Washington and who was driving domestic policies and how. So I wouldn't think that a reader from another country would get a lot out of this book unless they were unusually well tuned to the American mind.
I don't think it is the kind of book you can really say you enjoy. A lot of the stories have passed into the public discussion, so they don't often come off as surprises. The people depicted including the central actor in the drama are hard to understand when it comes to motivation, and so many things that happen seem to come about because of whim. This is a lot of the reason it doesn't read like a fictional story where the author would take better care of outlining the themes and the characters so that you come away with a sense that you understood why things happen the way they do. Maybe we'll get to that point eventually, or maybe not. I do feel a bit better informed having read it, but I am very glad I am past it now.