Non-Fiction That's Very Persuasive: A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“A Higher Loyalty” is the first no-holes-barred BIG MEMOIR by a key player in the alarming melodrama that is the Trump administration. The fired-up former FBI Director Jim Coomey's newly-released book underscores just how outside presidential norms Trump’s behavior has been — how ignorant he is about his basic duties as president, and how willfully he has flouted the checks and balances that safeguard our democracy, including the essential independence of the judiciary and law enforcement.

A HIGHER LOYALTY
Truth, Lies, and Leadership
By James Comey
290 pages. Flatiron Books. $29.99.

"In his absorbing new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey calls the Trump presidency a “forest fire” that is doing serious damage to the country’s norms and traditions.

“This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values,” Comey writes. “His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty. . .

The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law. Dishonesty, he writes, was central “to the entire enterprise of organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic,” and so, too, were bullying, peer pressure and groupthink — repellent traits shared by Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture. . . .

“A Higher Loyalty” also provides sharp sketches of key players in three presidential administrations: Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal adviser David S. Addington, George W. Bush's national security adviser and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama’s attorney general Loretta Lynch . . . "

Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic for The New York Times, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.” Follow her on Twitter: @michikokakutani

 

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