{"id":1656,"date":"2018-01-09T05:15:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T05:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=1656"},"modified":"2025-09-29T17:34:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T17:34:28","slug":"wsj-book-review-of-fire-and-fury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=1656","title":{"rendered":"WSJ – book review of “Fire and Fury”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A short and somewhat amusing review. I’ve excerpted the beginning and ending paragraphs below the link, since there is a paywall. The reviewer is Barton Swaim<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Michael Wolff has done what the rest of us chump writers can only dream of: He has gotten himself and his book denounced by a sitting U.S. president on live television. That, together with a cease-and-desist letter sent from the president\u2019s attorneys to the publisher, will ensure not only that the book makes Mr. Wolff a truckload of money but also that it gets talked about for a generation. \u201cFire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House\u201d is thus in a class with Salman Rushdie\u2019s \u201cSatanic Verses\u201d\u2014by itself a forgettable book, certainly not Mr. Rushdie\u2019s best, but remembered forever as having provoked a death sentence from Iran\u2019s Ayatollah Khomeini. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one sense, \u201cFire and Fury\u201d is a typical piece of \u201caccess journalism,\u201d as it\u2019s known, like many titles by Bob Woodward or, on the more gossipy side, like the \u201cGame Change\u201d books by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Mr. Wolff takes the genre to another level, and perhaps a lower level. If he has employed objective criteria for deciding what to include or exclude, it\u2019s not clear what those criteria are. By the looks of it, he included any story, so long as it was juicy. We\u2019re told, for instance, of Mr. Trump\u2019s supposed method of bedding other men\u2019s wives in his pre-presidential days; of Mr. Trump\u2019s promise to his wife, who had no interest in being first lady, that everything was OK because he wasn\u2019t going to win anyway; of the president\u2019s scolding of the White House cleaning staff for picking up his shirt from the floor (\u201cIf my shirt is on the floor, it\u2019s because I want it on the floor\u201d); and many other such weird tales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former chief political strategist Steve Bannon was evidently the source of the book\u2019s most staggering revelations\u2014if \u201crevelations\u201d is the right word for the sort of titillating office gossip that Mr. Wolff reports as fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

******<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Wolff has been hotly criticized by prominent members of the news media for his slipshod reporting, but in this regard his manner isn\u2019t so different from much of today\u2019s political journalism\u2014not just books of access journalism like this one but the day-to-day reporting issuing from our most prestigious news outlets. Reporters, especially though not exclusively political reporters, are more interested in the meaning of facts than in the facts themselves. They\u2019re concerned with interpretation rather than accuracy, with \u201cnarrative\u201d rather than detail, with explaining rather than disclosing, with who\u2019s happy or angry about a story rather than whether it\u2019s true, with what\u2019s likely to happen next week or next year rather than with what happened yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Mr. Wolff had considered it his job to tell us what happened, and not merely to offer up his own clever interpretation of what happened, he might not have felt emboldened to repeat every unseemly tidbit he could extract from murmuring White House staffers. But then he wouldn\u2019t have gotten rich.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A short and somewhat amusing review. I’ve excerpted the beginning and ending paragraphs below the link, since there is a paywall. The reviewer is Barton Swaim. Michael Wolff has done what the rest of us chump writers can only dream of: He has gotten himself and his book denounced by a sitting U.S. president on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13228,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions\/13228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}