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Book Summary and Reviews of Rage by Bob Woodward

Rage by Bob Woodward
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About this book

Book Summary

Bob Woodward's new book, Rage, is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest.

Woodward, the #1 international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers into the Oval Office as Trump's head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans.

In 17 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months—an utterly vivid window into Trump's mind—the president provides a self-portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the "dynamite behind every door."

At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump's responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president.

Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making.

Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses as well as participants' notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents.

Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a "fantasy film."

Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. "Don't worry about it, Bob. Okay?" Trump told the author in July. "Don't worry about it. We'll get to do another book. You'll find I was right."

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Woodward follows Fear with another alarming and deeply reported account of turmoil, dysfunction, and recklessness within the Trump administration... This devastating report will leave a lasting mark." —Publishers Weekly

"The book possesses more than a patina of similarity to the famous televised interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon, the president Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down with their reporting on Watergate nearly a half-century ago." —The Guardian

"[T]his revealing look at an embattled presidency facing a pandemic, racial unrest and a suffering economy…the book's details have been explosive." —USA Today

This information about Rage was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Bob Woodward Author Biography

Photograph: Lisa Berg

Robert Upshur Woodward, known as Bob, was born in March 1943 in Geneva, Illinois.  He studied history and English literature at Yale, receiving his B.A. in 1965, after which he spent four years as a Naval officer.  He was discharged as a Lieutenant in 1970 after serving as an aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas H Moorer.  He was hired by The Washington Post but was let go after his two-week trial because he lacked any experience as a journalist.  After a year working for the Montgomery Sentinel, he reapplied to The Washington Post and was given a job in August 1971.  Less than a year, later Woodward and Carl Bernstein were assigned to investigate the burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in a ...

... Full Biography
Link to Bob Woodward's Website

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