Book cover
I haven't been sleeping well.  A good friend of mine suggested that my reading this book may be one of the reasons.  I can't dispute that directly.  As I write this, right before New Year's 2018, I'm actively looking for employment, and that is stressful, but this book definitely hasn't helped.

Subtitled Trump in the White House, Fear is about the presidency of Donald Trump and written by the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.  The book is separated into 42 numbered but untitled chapters which are mostly organized by time, though not entirely.  Each chapter reads like two or three long, stand-alone articles about some set of probably related events or issues during the early parts of Trump's presidency, though I often missed how or why each is grouped together in the same chapter.

The book is well written, and seems to take great pains to state things that happened without editorializing.  This is old-school reporting, which is a difficult style to get used to again, now that I've been living in the modern age of commentary-instead-of-news.  There's a lot of stuff described here.

Emotionally, though, I found the whole book to be exhausting.  Sometimes, because I disagree with what Trump did or tried to do.  Sometimes, because I disagree with things people on Trump's staff did to prevent Trump from doing something.  That is, regardless of whether a reader is a Trump supporter, there's a lot to feel exhausted about.

I almost didn't have the energy to finish this book, and there are a lot of valid reasons to skip it; emotional stamina being near the top.  I read the paper regularly, so there wasn't a lot of major events recounted here that were new to me, though the described machinations of how the White House runs under Trump was enlightening.  Read this book if, like me, you are a politics junkie.


Fear
Current Events
Simon & Schuster
Released: 11 September 2018
Hardcover, 448 pages