Book Summary and Reviews of Fear by Bob Woodward

Fear by Bob Woodward

Fear

Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

  • Readers' Rating (4):
  • Published:
  • Sep 2018, 448 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The inside story on President Trump, as only Bon Woodward can tell it.

With authoritative reporting honed through nine presidencies, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump's White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies.

Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president's first years in office. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.

Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. Often with day-by-day details, dialogue and documentation, Fear tracks key foreign issues from North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East, NATO, China and Russia. It reports in-depth on Trump's key domestic issues particularly trade and tariff disputes, immigration, tax legislation, the Paris Climate Accord and the racial violence in Charlottesville in 2017.

Fear presents vivid details of the negotiations between Trump's attorneys and Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, laying out for the first time the meeting-by-meeting discussions and strategies. It discloses how senior Trump White House officials joined together to steal draft orders from the president's Oval Office desk so he would not issue directives that would jeopardize top secret intelligence operations.

"It was no less than an administrative coup d'état," Woodward writes, "a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful county in the world."

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A harrowing portrait of the Trump presidency ... Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump's national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders." —The Washington Post

"A devastating reported account of the Trump Presidency that will be consulted as a first draft of the grim history it portrays ... What Woodward has written is not just the story of a deeply flawed President but also, finally, an account of what those surrounding him have chosen to do about it." —The New Yorker

"Fear is Woodward at his best, the quintessential investigative reporter with an eye for detail and an uncanny ability to get key players to ensure that their perspective is etched into history. Its timing could not be more critical for a nation exhausted by tweets and spin, and trying to assess the danger to democracy posed by a presidency that shatters its norms and demeans its institutions." —San Francisco Chronicle

This information about Fear 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 ...

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Read-Alikes

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