Hi Womble! Hope you're fully recovered 💛
As usual—far too much! But have finished some of these 😍
Harare Review of Books
@hararereview.com
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✍🏾 Jacqueline Nyathi, librocubicularist, friendly neighbourhood "You *Must* Read This" person. hararereview.com 📝📚 @thecontinent.org, @strangehorizons.bsky.social etc (Incidentally, also @shonatiger.hararereview.com)
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The Sunday Book
Curated by Jacqueline Nyathi
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
One can't read this account of President Trump's second term without feeling wholly aghast at the sheer hubris of the man, born of a toxic combination of his self-belief and his delusions of persecution. But Trump says something revealing and difficult to dispute, quoted at the end of the book: "They illegally indicted me, they impeached me, they did everything-they shot me, I guess you could say. But I won the election in a landslide.
Nobody else could've done it [..] And there's only one thing you can say about me that anybody believes, and you know what that is. [...] Essentially I won every f--ing time."
Not many could sift through the bewildering morass of detail-stories, news, court cases, scandals, outright lies, trolling, rumour, confusion-produced by the Trump administration, and the associated, astonishing rise of his MAGA movement, to pull off such a compelling and gripping narrative but Haberman and Swan have. Regime Change, a contender for the best non-fiction book you'll read this year, is full of incredibly rich detail, some of it bemusing - like Trump wielding superglue to affix gold decorations above the mantel in the Oval Office.
Trump's been fearless, in his second term, about ignoring systems and conventions underlying the so-called rules-based international order. And there have been no personal consequences, kind of justifying his behavior. What all this implies for the future of the US- and the world, should the rest of us continue to depend on US power- is beyond alarming; but the conclusion cannot be avoided: the old world has died, and a new one is born.
Maybe there will indeed be monuments to Donald Trump; still, what a student of human history might imagine is two vast and trunkless legs of stone in the desert.
Jacqueline Nyathi has loved books for as long as she can reme…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:r24znqrzpv227wrabmtqrujs/bafkreifw2stslxrpaqpncfsvroh4w2rjzni67il5eefyaruijvyoenozay)
