RAGE by Bob Woodward

  

Nonfiction / biography

480 pages

4 stars

 

 

This is my first Bob Woodward book. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, and I don’t know if it was the writing, the editing, or the subject, but I found it easy to put the book down, but it was also easy to pick it up and start again. Normally, a 500-page book wouldn’t take me very long to read – 5 days at the outside, but this book took me close to two weeks.

 

The writing was nothing less than I would expect from a pro like Woodward, so I’m going to guess the subject matter was my problem with the book. I did like the fact that Woodward looked for and reported on the good things he found with Mr. Trump, though they were few and far between. 

 

This was also my first Trump book, and though it wasn’t anything new and surprising (it has all, or most all, been said and reported through the last few years, but the book was a good chronology of those events, with a lot of backstory.

 

My favorite part was the early part, where Woodward talked about the early cabinet members— Mattis, Pompeo, Tillerson. Mattis is a bit of a local hero here, in Richland WA, who I’d never heard of until he went to work for Trump’s White House. Frankly, it was good to meet my neighbor, at least through this means, and now I’d like to meet him in actuality. And I was, somehow, quite pleased that Mad Dog was a name Trump gave him. His code name was in fact, Chaos, but Trump liked Mad Dog better. The same with Tillerson. These two men in particular worked hard to educate Trump, to help our country, until finally…

 

My understanding of reportage is that a good reporter (Woodward) will look for both sides of the story and report them both as honestly as possible. I think Woodward did an admirable job of it.