Contemporary Authors

• The Poet at the Piano: Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, and Other Artists at Work Times Books (New York, NY), 1988
• The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump Tim Duggan Books (New York, NY), 2018

1. The death of truth LCCN 2018025786 Type of material Book Personal name Kakutani, Michiko, author. Main title The death of truth / Michiko Kakutani. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Tim Duggan Books, 2018. Projected pub date 1807 Description 1 online resource. ISBN 9780525574842 (E-Book) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. The death of truth : notes on falsehood in the age of trump LCCN 2018010263 Type of material Book Personal name Kakutani, Michiko, author. Main title The death of truth : notes on falsehood in the age of trump / Michiko Kakutani. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Tim Duggan Books, 2018. Description 208 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9780525574828 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER JK1726 .K355 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. The poet at the piano : portraits of writers, filmmakers, playwrights, and other artists at work LCCN 88008009 Type of material Book Personal name Kakutani, Michiko. Main title The poet at the piano : portraits of writers, filmmakers, playwrights, and other artists at work / Michiko Kakutani. Edition Pbk. ed. Published/Created New York : P. Bedrick Books, 1989. Description xxii, 247 p. : 22 cm. ISBN 0872262103 (alk. paper) : Item not available at the Library. Why not? 4. The poet at the piano : portraits of writers, filmmakers, playwrights, and other artists at work LCCN 87026565 Type of material Book Personal name Kakutani, Michiko. Main title The poet at the piano : portraits of writers, filmmakers, playwrights, and other artists at work / Michiko Kakutani. Published/Created New York : Times Books, c1988. Description xxii, 247 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0812912772 : CALL NUMBER PN453 .K34 1988 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER PN453 .K34 1988 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Rolling Stone - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/michiko-kakutani-on-her-essential-new-book-the-death-of-truth-666137/

  Michiko Kakutani on Her Essential New Book ‘The Death of Truth’
  With a series of brilliant essays, the legendary book critic has crafted the first great piece of literature on the Trump administration

  By SEAN WOODS

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  Q&A: Michiko Kakutani on Her Essential New Book, ‘The Death of Truth'
  "Trump is both a bizarro-world apotheosis of many larger trends undermining truth, and a flame-thrower who is accelerating these attitudes," Michiko Kakutani explains.

  Petr Hlinomaz

  Forget Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, forget Hillary Clinton’s and James Comey’s ridiculously self-serving memoirs. Former chief book critic for The New York Times Michiko Kakutani has written the first great book of the Trump administration. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (out July 17th) is a fiery polemic against the president and should go down as essential reading.

  In nine exquisitely crafted broadsides, the 63-year-old Pulitzer winner calls upon her vast knowledge of literature, philosophy and politics to serve up a damning state of the union. She cites those you might expect from the authoritarian cannon: George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Hannah Arendt, but easily pivots to David Foster Wallace, Spike Jonze and Tom Wolfe. She deftly traces the history of leftist postmodern academics who helped usher in relativism and led us away from objective truths, but saves some of her most withering attacks for the right-wing media (FOX News, Brietbart, et al) that set the stage for a dangerous demagogue like Trump.

  It’s the fluidity and grace of her prose, however, that leave the reader amazed by Kakutani’s virtuoso talent and command. “Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance,” she writes, “can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the Constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.”

  The Death of Truth is a clear-eyed, if dismal, blueprint for how we got here and why our society has been pushed to the very brink. Rolling Stone reached Kakutani by email for the following exchange:

  What was the genesis of this book?
  Like many people, I became increasingly alarmed during the 2016 campaign and the first year of the Trump administration by the full-on war being waged on the very idea of truth. The Washington Post estimated that President Trump emits nearly six false or misleading claims a day. And it’s not just the liar-in-chief who is spreading “alternative facts” and assailing reason and science; it’s also his political and media enablers, aided and abetted by Russian trolls. The consequences for our democracy are grave: The lies spewed forth by Trump and company are promoting division and discord in the country at large, inflaming bigotry and hatred and elevating partisanship and tribal politics over shared values and the democratic ideals embodied in the Constitution. With the erosion of truth, we are made susceptible to propaganda (from the Russians, the White House and the likes of the NRA), our institutions are undermined, and rational public discourse is imperiled.

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  One of the things I wanted to do in The Death of Truth was explore some of the larger social and political dynamics that fueled the rise of Trump and brought America to the point where a third of the country will casually shrug off hard facts about everything from the size of inaugural crowds to the crime rate among immigrants. Those broader dynamics include the toxic partisanship that increasingly afflicts our politics; the merging of news and politics with entertainment; the growing populist disdain for expertise; the embrace of subjectivity and relativism by both the right and left; the growth of online filter bubbles that segregate us into silos of like-minded users; and the viral spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories on the web. Trump is both a bizarro-world apotheosis of many larger trends undermining truth today, and a flame-thrower who is accelerating these alarming attitudes.

  One of your last pieces for the Times was seen as comparing Trump to Hitler. This book takes that case further. Did you hesitate to go there?
  There are personality traits in common – toxic narcissism, a fondness for superlatives, an instinct for lying, bullying and manipulation. And parallels can be drawn between Hitler’s ascent and the rise of Trump: from his translation of his own mendacity into a shameless propaganda machine, to his Machiavellian exploitation of his audiences’ fears and resentments, to other politicians’ craven failure to stand up to him.

  This is not to draw a direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era, but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes – what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” – that make a people susceptible to demagoguery, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. And to remind readers of the fragility of democracy – of how quickly the rule of law can be broken and how rapidly civil liberties can erode.

  America is being bombarded with disinformation from the White House and its allies – designed, you write, to keep the population not only misled but paranoid and off-balance. Do you see any solutions or ways to combat this crisis?
  The role of a free and independent press has never been more important, and investigative reporters – working for newspapers, magazines, online outlets, radio and television – have been doing vital, necessary work, trying to untangle Trump and his campaign’s relationship with Russia, and expose the culture of lying and corruption that has flourished under his administration, while sounding warning bells about the consequences of his assault on truth.

  The problem is that such reports do not reach many of the president’s most ardent supporters, who live in Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting silos, and who shrug off any news that does not ratify their pre-existing beliefs. At the same time, the volume and velocity of Trump’s lies, his multiplying scandals and violations of norms threaten to overwhelm the public, resulting in numbness and cynicism – the very traits that autocrats (like Vladimir Putin) rely upon to sabotage dissent and strengthen their own hold on power.

  Given the role that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica played in efforts to influence the 2016 election, it’s also imperative that Silicon Valley leaders and policy makers address the ways in which social media – and the manipulation and monetization of data – is spreading misinformation, conspiracy theories and out-and-out propaganda, while undermining transparency and accountability.

  It’s important that communities support local, independent journalism, which many people rely upon for information relevant to their daily lives. At the same time, schools ought to add media literacy to their curriculums (teaching kids how to differentiate between facts and opinions, between the verifiable and the merely popular), while reviving lessons in civics, with an emphasis on the Constitution and the founders’ efforts to protect the American republic from those who, in Alexander Hamilton’s words, might “flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day” in order to embarrass the government and “throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'”

  Did the media fail in its most basic duty during the 2016 campaign?
  In pursuit of the clicks and eyeballs that Trump generated, the media gave the former reality-TV star an estimated $5 billion in free campaign coverage. Many outlets paid more attention to scandals and questions of personality than to substantive matters of policy (like the consequences a Trump administration would have on, say, national security, health care, immigration, the budget), and more attention to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to the Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia. Like James Comey, much of the press assumed that Clinton was going to win the election, and that assumption wasn’t only wrong – it also affected coverage.

  H.L. Mencken wrote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Isn’t that exactly what we are seeing with Trump? Is this our own reckoning of 50-odd years of partisan fighting and a failure of our political class?
  Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment, and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. His promises to “drain the swamp” and reduce taxes on the middle class, however, turned out to be lies: Since taking office, he has made the swamp deeper and wider than ever, presiding over an administration filled with grifters and dark money – an administration that’s delivered tax cuts not to ordinary people, but to corporations and the very rich. His surprise election blindsided the political and media establishment, which underestimated the anti-elitist sentiment in the country and the toxic efficacy of Trump’s fear-mongering, and which was also slow to recognize the dangerous levels of misinformation being spread by the alt-right and Russia on the web.

  You compare the times we are living in to Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World – what other works served as your lodestar in writing this book?
  Hannah Arendt was another touchstone. Her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism was not just a study of how Nazism and Stalinism took root in the 20th century, but a warning about the many factors that can contribute to the rise of totalitarianism, including social alienation and the rise of tribal politics; the use of propaganda appealing to people’s prejudices and resentments; and a widespread disregard for the truth, which makes individuals susceptible to the efforts of a leader or government to control reality.

  Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 book The Image uncannily foresaw an America in which “pseudo-events” displace reality, celebrities replace genuine heroes, and verisimilitude takes the place of truth.

  Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics was remarkably prescient about the wave of anger and irrationalism in the country, which Trump both embodies and foments – a recurring attitude in U.S. history characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” and focused on perceived threats to “a nation, a culture, a way of life.”

  You take deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida to task for muddying language and helping to create a view, especially on the left, that there are no objective truths. Given that Trump doesn’t read, how did that sort of thinking reach the right and why were they so successful at weaponizing it?
  Deconstruction and postmodernism were part of a larger relativism that swept through western culture in the wake of the 1960s, as society became increasingly fragmented and subjectivity (see Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism) grew ascendant. Grand narratives (like a belief in the Enlightenment values of progress and science that America was founded upon) gave way to smaller, more personal truths, and a Rashomon-like view of the world gained traction throughout the culture. FOX News and the planetary system of right-wing news sites that would orbit it and, later, Breitbart, were particularly adept at weaponizing such arguments and exploiting the increasingly partisan fervor animating the Republican base: They accused the media establishment of “liberal bias,” and substituted their own right-wing views as “fair and balanced” – a redefinition of terms that was a harbinger of Trump’s hijacking of “fake news” to refer not to alt-right conspiracy theories and Russian troll posts, but to real news that he perceived as inconvenient or a threat to himself.

  George Orwell wrote almost 75 years ago, “The English language is in a bad way.” What do you think he would say today?
  Orwell was incredibly prescient about so many things. He would be appalled but likely not all that surprised by the current state of the English language. In fact, 1984 and Animal Farm anticipate many of the linguistic and political sins committed by Donald Trump, from his reflexive lying, to his redefining of words and phrases to mean their opposite (i.e. “fake news,” “witch hunt”), to his efforts to deny objective reality. His bombast and juvenile insults demean the office of the presidency, not to mention common decency; and his own racist invective has mainstreamed the scurrilous use of bigoted language that only a few years ago was largely confined to the fringes in the national conversation.

  Reading this book made me think that the country is hopelessly broken – do you see any reason for hope or optimism?
  The Parkland kids and the anti-gun violence movement they’re leading are an inspiration – and a testament to the impact that young people are having on the national conversation, and to the power that a handful of dedicated individuals can exert when they take a stand and get out and organize. The Women’s March and the record number of women running for office are similarly signs that the Resistance is alive and well. And Silicon Valley insiders like Jaron Lanier, Pierre Omidyar and Roger McNamee are warning about the dangers of social media and algorithms designed to maximize clicks and ad revenue.

  Principled members of the judiciary and law enforcement – most notably, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and James Comey – refused to cave to Trump’s efforts to bend the rule of law, and private citizens are speaking out on the assault underway against the institutions that help safeguard our democracy. And as Robert Mueller and his prosecutorial dream team quietly continue their work, reporters are working 24-7 to hold Trump and company to account, producing journalism that is nothing less than essential.

  Do you think truth can be resurrected?
  All of the above are signs of hope. The last two years have made many of us realize that we cannot take the freedoms afforded by democracy for granted. As citizens, we must all insist on facts, accountability, rational policy-making and informed public discourse. We must reject the transactional cynicism that the Trump administration promotes, and refuse to normalize the falsehoods and rule-breaking that this president pelts us with every day.

  It’s up to all of us to see that truth prevails.

  In This Article: Books, Donald Trump

• Vulture - http://www.vulture.com/2018/07/michiko-kakutani-on-the-death-of-truth.html#comments

  230 Minutes With Michiko Kakutani
  Instagramming New York by night on her first publication day.

  By Shawn McCreesh
  Photograph by Mark Seliger

  It’s 8:50 p.m., ten minutes before closing, and Michiko Kakutani is riffling through vinyl at A1 Records on East 6th Street, searching in vain for a copy of Beggars Banquet. “The Stones are my all-time favorite,” she says. “I wonder if they have any other Keith stuff here.” Kakutani worships Keith Richards. “I think he’s the heart and the soul of the Stones,” she explains. “He’s just inhaled all blues and musical history and he really wants to pass that knowledge on. I thought his memoir was totally amazing.”

  Her opinion of that book is more important than yours, or mine, or anyone’s. That’s because in 2010, as chief book critic for the New York Times, she reviewed it. For three decades, hers was the most influential voice in publishing, her name itself turned into a verb. (You never wanted to be “Kakutanied.”) The line on her as a critic, loosely speaking, was that she was generous to talented newcomers and unforgiving of old lions who’d begun to coast. She memorably took down Norman Mailer, who hit back with flat-out racism.

  Now she finds herself in the position of the reviewed rather than the reviewer. Last summer, she took a buyout from the Times after 38 years and began work on a slim book of her own. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump has gone on sale the morning before we meet in the record shop. She helps me pick out two ’90s deep-house records and, as we exit, whips out her iPhone and points it toward the back of the store. The next day on Instagram, the photo appears: “A1 Record Shop, NYC #Vinyl #NYC.” It’s up to 256 likes (and counting).

  A few years ago, we might not have met. Until recently, you were likelier to have seen a snow leopard in Manhattan than to meet Kakutani in the wild. She is a workaholic who routinely writes through the night. She has everything sent to her Upper West Side apartment, from vintage dresses found on eBay (“Vintage stores in New York got really picked over”) to grilled cheese sandwiches. “I’m not much of a cook,” she says. “I used to keep books in my gas oven, until someone told me it was a fire hazard.” Yet in person, she’s talkative and prone to laughter. We step out into the night, wandering in a vaguely downtown direction, stopping to snap anything that looks cool along the way.

  Owing to the new book, she’s being prodded to emerge, if only a little. “I am shy and self-conscious and awkward, so I think that’s why I became a writer,” Kakutani says. “I was the kid in class who was afraid to get called on.” TV appearances are out of the question. But she has revealed herself to a new degree. Known for never using the first-person pronoun in reviews (it was always “the reader”), she recently filed a piece to the Times’ “Sunday Review” section that was, for her, unprecedentedly personal. Kakutani’s mother and aunt, she revealed, had been among the Japanese-Americans interned in the Utah desert in 1942. “I find it hard to write in the first person,” she says. “But I felt motivated because of those poor kids at the border.”

  On Second Avenue, we step around a teary couple rooted to the sidewalk mid-breakup. A few blocks later, she shakes her head at a Citi Bike rack, saying, “Why do they have to make them so ugly?”

  The Instagram feed is the main concession she’s made to public digital life. She started it at the suggestion of her book publisher a few months ago and now says she’s “addicted.” It reveals only so much: @michi_kakutani (1,628 followers as of today) is a stream of street scenes and atmospheric shots of favorite bookstores and restaurants. (“I don’t take selfies.”) And then there are her two other accounts, each with zero followers; one consists entirely of black-and-white pictures of the street, the other a mix of photos she’s still experimenting with, including a rare one of herself, shot on a recent visit to Instagram’s New York offices. “My friends don’t even follow these accounts,” she says, “but sometimes I take them out at dinner to show people.” And no, she won’t reveal the usernames.

  On Instagram, Kakutani never shows her face. Photo: michi_kakutani/Instagram
  Kakutani has always had a thing for photography. In college, she spent a semester studying art in Paris at the Académie Julian. Then it was back to Yale, where her mathematician father, Shizuo, was a professor. (His Kakutani fixed-point theorem, impossible to explain in lay terms, is significant in set theory.) “I didn’t get the math gene,” she says. “I think they realized that early on. But in college I did a lot of darkroom stuff with 35-millimeter, and I used Tri-X film. I loved the darkroom — it’s a magical process.”

  Continuing west on Bond, we pass a group of girls posing on the stoop of a building while a friend impatiently takes their picture from different angles. “Ready?” asks the friend, adding, “C’mon guys, let’s go. I know you’re Instagram-famous, but we’re late.” Kakutani laughs. “I realized a lot of the people I take photos of while walking around New York are either bent over their phones with their heads poking out, turtlelike, or taking photos of themselves or each other,” she says.

  On Varick, we talk of pre-cell-phone New York. Kakutani says one of her favorite haunts back then was Heartbreak, a club on this street between King and Charlton. “We used to go there to dance.” Kakutani frequented CBGB, where she would go to hear the Ramones and Talking Heads. “I’m so short I could never actually see the bands,” she says. (She’s five feet tall.)

  We cross Canal and begin discussing Trump and his absurd “double negative” remarks. “He’s rendering language meaningless,” she says. “It’s all this chaos all the time. I do think he’s like the Joker. He thrives on chaos and anarchy, and it’s all part of getting people cynical so they don’t care, just like in Russia.”

  It’s after midnight, and she is warming to her subject. “The propaganda in Russia that Putin puts out is getting so parallel to Trump,” she says. “It has the psychological and emotional effect of wearing people down, and that’s what people have to not let happen.”

  Then she spots some graffiti scrawled across a building on the other side of the street. “Look, that’s so cool,” she says. “It reminds me of Basquiat or something.” She darts over to take a picture.

  *This article appears in the July 23, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Su

• Vanity Fair - https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/06/michiko-kakutani-seliger-portrait-the-death-of-truth

  Michiko Kakutani Turns the Tables with The Death of Truth
  The legendary former book critic for The New York Times explains why she decided to become an author in the Trump era.
  by JIM KELLY
  JUNE 1, 2018 7:00 AM
  michiko kakutani
  FACTS ARE MANY
  Michiko Kakutani, photographed at the Seliger Studio, in New York City. Styled by Madeline Weeks; hair and makeup by Birgitte; produced on location by Coco Knudson; for details, go to VF.com/Credits.

  Photograph by Mark Seliger.
  Donald Trump has battled many a journalist, but he has not yet faced as eloquent and coruscating an authority as Michiko Kakutani, the fearless book critic of The New York Times for three and a half decades, who left the paper last year to write The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. “One reason I wrote this book is to call attention to those who in their own times found what Margaret Atwood has called the ‘danger flags,’” she says, “in this case the denunciation of ‘fake news’ and the citing of ‘alternative facts’ by Trump and his White House.”

  Kakutani, the daughter of a Yale University mathematician, analyzes with peerless acuity the threads in culture and politics that came together to create the perfect carnival tent for the Con Man from Queens. “Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.”

  Try Vanity Fair and receive a free tote.Join Now
  Fearsome as she is in print—Norman Mailer called her a “one-woman kamikaze,” while Jonathan Franzen crowned her “the stupidest person in New York City” after she panned his memoir, an epithet that did not deter her from giving his next book a rave—Michi, as her friends know her, is mild in manner in person and shy by habit, displaying not a shred of hauteur. Invocation of her byline has lent intellectual veneer to shows like Sex and the City and Girls. But her name has been far more recognizable than she is, given the scarcity of images existing of her.

  Yet after reviewing thousands of books and winning a Pulitzer along the way, she did not find it difficult to write her own. “It was an evolution of what I did at the Times, where I tried to take part in the conversation of ideas, both in fiction and nonfiction. This was like running a marathon instead of doing a lot of sprints.”

• Vox - https://www.vox.com/2018/7/25/17612566/trump-michiko-kakutani-new-york-times-book-critic

  Michiko Kakutani, esteemed book critic, has finally written a book. It’s about Trump.
  After three decades as the New York Times’s book critic, Kakutani has written her first book.
  By Eric Allen Been Jul 25, 2018, 12:50pm EDT
  SHARE

  Michiko Kakutani in New York City in 2018. Petr Hlinomaz
  “His lies are meant to wear us down,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michiko Kakutani of our president. “To overwhelm and exhaust us, to make people so cynical that they cease to distinguish between fact and fiction.”

  This is just one of many musings on the nature of reality Kakutani chronicles in her slim yet wide-ranging new book The Death of Truth, her first book. At its core, The Death of Truth seeks to question how the notion of the truth became such a contested subject in our present moment. Kakutani concedes that the attack on objectivity is nothing new, but also maintains it has been “exponentially accelerated” in recent times by postmodernism and social media.

  The former chief book critic for the New York Times, Kakutani worked for the paper for 38 years until she took a buyout last year (she still writes periodic pieces for them). During her tenure, she was arguably the most influential book critic in the US, playing a crucial role in boosting the careers of writers like Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, and George Saunders. Some thought she was too influential, wielding too much clout in publishing.

  She was feared and loathed by writers like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Jonathan Franzen for her scathing reviews. Yet she always avoided the spotlight while at the Times, refusing to do interviews or panels and hardly ever appearing in photographs. Given her intellectual range and output over the past several decades, it’s surprising that The Death of Truth is her first book.

  I talked with Kakutani about, among other things, what the response should be to those who attack the truth, whether artists have a responsibility to be political, her thoughts on the late Philip Roth, and what books she’d recommend to Trump and Mike Pence. Our conversation, lightly edited and condensed, appears below.

  Eric Allen Been
  You write that some “dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernism have seeped into the thinking of the populist right.

  Michiko Kakutani
  With its suspicion of grand, overarching narratives, postmodernism emphasized the role that perspective plays in shaping our readings of texts and events. Such ideas resulted in innovative, groundbreaking art — think of the work of David Foster Wallace, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Gehry, to name but a few — and it opened the once-narrow gates of history to heretofore marginalized points of view.

  But as such, ideas seeped into popular culture and merged with the narcissism of the “Me Decade” [and] also led to a more reductive form of relativism that allowed people to insist that their opinions were just as valid as objective truths verified by scientific evidence or serious investigative reporting. Climate change deniers demanded equal time, creationists argued that intelligent design should be taught alongside “science-based” evolution, and Fox News insisted it was “fair and balanced.” All this proved fertile ground in which lies spread by Donald Trump, alt-right trolls, and Russian propagandists could take root.

  Eric Allen Been
  As you track in the book, Trump did not spring out of nowhere. What writers from the past can help us better understand this notion that those in power often try to define what the truth is?

  Michiko Kakutani
  Books by Hannah Arendt, such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Crises of the Republic, examine the role that the despoiling of truth played in the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. Her work not only provides a look at how two of the most monstrous regimes in history came to power in the 20th century, but a more universal sort of anatomy of what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” that make people susceptible to demagoguery and propaganda, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats.

  The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday gives readers a haunting account of how Europe tore itself apart in World War I, then lurched only decades later into the calamities of World War II, charting how easily reason and science can be dethroned by emotional appeals to fear and hatred.

  Books by Richard Hofstadter — The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life chronicle the episodic waves of a dark strain of thinking in American history animated by grievance, dispossession, and conspiratorial thinking. Earlier eruptions include the popularity of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party in the mid-1850s and the spread of McCarthyism in the 1950s.

  Eric Allen Been
  Until last year, you, of course, were the chief daily book critic for the New York Times. And you’ve spent most of your career avoiding putting yourself front and center — shunning public events, interviews, photographs, etc. Why did you take that approach? And has putting yourself more out there while promoting this book been difficult?

  Michiko Kakutani
  Being a shy person, I have preferred to let my writing speak for itself. In fact, I probably became a writer partly because I’ve always felt more articulate on paper than in person. Writing The Death of Truth felt like a natural progression from what I was doing at the Times — a kind of amplified version of the sort of notebooks I wrote as a critic.

  Eric Allen Been
  Are there any notable reviews you’ve published that you’ve had a change of mind about?

  Michiko Kakutani
  Most readers are likely to think somewhat differently about a book if they reread it years later. My perspective on individual books has probably evolved — or been tweaked by reading the author’s subsequent work — but I can’t think of cases in which my view of a particular book changed in a more fundamental way.

  Eric Allen Been
  You’ve been called the “most feared woman in publishing.” And I’m sure you know about some of the more infamous pushbacks you received while at the Times, notably from writers like Jonathan Franzen, who called you “the stupidest person in New York City” after you panned his memoir. How did you view those personal attacks?

  Michiko Kakutani
  I tried to never take things personally. I tried to review every book on its own merits; what an author said about me was irrelevant to how I approached a book. As it happens, I very much admired Franzen’s last two novels and said so in my reviews.

  Eric Allen Been
  You were a champion of Philip Roth’s work, and you quote him toward the end of The Death of Truth. Many people find Roth’s work off-putting, however, often arguing that his books are shot through with a misogynist sense of sexual entitlement. Do you think the criticism is fair?

  Michiko Kakutani
  Philip Roth was an author who helped define the American experience in works like The Human Stain and The Plot Against America. At the same time, much of his fiction also reflected the country’s narcissistic, inward-looking proclivities in the aftermath of the 1960s.

  I regard his 1997 novel American Pastoral as one of the masterpieces of postwar fiction, and greatly admired Roth’s myriad gifts — his provocative exploration of the American embrace of the principles of rebellion and reinvention and the resulting sense of rootlessness; his tireless ability to complicate his own life on paper; his verbal inventiveness and his manic wit.

  Roth did manage to create a handful of genuinely complex female characters in American Pastoral and The Human Stain, but many of the women in his books are shallowly depicted as simple objects of lust or the source of endless vexation for Roth’s heroes. I was sharply critical, for instance, of Sabbath’s Theater, which I viewed as a tiresome and willfully repellent portrait of a narcissist, who treats women with cruelty and contempt.

  But Roth does not necessarily endorse the point of view of his misogynistic heroes — in fact, they often emerge as misguided, limited, and deeply flawed characters, who hurt themselves and the people around them with their selfishness and inability to love.

  Eric Allen Been
  Do artists today have a responsibility to address politics?

  Michiko Kakutani
  Artists need to have the freedom to follow the promptings of their own imaginations. That freedom is conferred by democracy; it’s only in autocratic states that artists are expected to produce one sort of art or another. And sometimes art that springs from the most personal of sources — like Franz Kafka’s novels and stories — comes to acquire great political and historical resonance.

  Eric Allen Been
  If you could recommend one book to Trump, and one separately for Mike Pence, what would they be?

  Michiko Kakutani
  For Trump, Shakespeare’s Richard III. For Pence, John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss and Marlon Bundo.

  Eric Allen Been is a freelance writer who has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Vice, Playboy, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Atlantic.

• Powell's Books - https://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-michiko-kakutani-author-of-the-death-of-truth

  PowellsBooks.Blog
  Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.
  Q&AS
  Powell's Q&A: Michiko Kakutani, Author of 'The Death of Truth'
  by Michiko Kakutani, July 17, 2018 11:02 AM
  The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani
  Photo credit: Petr Hlinomaz

  Describe your book.
  The 2016 presidential campaign and the first year of the Trump presidency made it clear that facts and the very idea of truth are under assault. The Washington Post calculated that President Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office — that’s an average of nearly 5.9 claims a day. And Trump is only the most shameless and visible purveyor of “alternative facts”: his Republican enablers in Congress, the right-wing media that amplifies his message, and Russian trolls who spread fake news far and wide over social media are all examples — and accelerants — of the mendacity and misinformation that is flooding the world and undermining the foundations of democracy.

  In The Death of Truth, I wanted to look at how we got here: how we lost our sense of a shared reality, how observable and basic scientific facts came to be routinely contested, how relativism — the belief that everything depends on your point of view — took root in popular culture.

  Watergate, the war in Iraq (and failure to find WMDs), and the financial crash of 2008 all played understandable roles in a growing public cynicism, and a loss of confidence in government, the media, and big business. So, too, have broader social dynamics — including the ever-growing polarization of our politics, the blurring of lines between news and entertainment, the elevation of subjectivity over objective truth, and the proliferation of filter-bubbles and echo chambers on the Web, which has made “confirmation bias” and the cherry-picking of information increasingly common. The partisanship of our politics has resulted in a virulent tribalism that defies Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s common-sense wisdom that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” while Trump and Russian trolls amplify discord and division for their own self-serving ends.

  The Death of Truth also explores the grave consequences of these developments. When the public comes to believe that all politicians lie and that all policies are transactional (a view that Trump promotes with his unprecedented volume of falsehoods and deliberate sowing of chaos), nihilism replaces trust. Without truth, there is no way for voters to make rational decisions at the ballot box, no way for government officials to make judicious policy decisions, no way for the public to hold politicians accountable.

  What was your favorite book as a child?
  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

  What does your writing workplace look like?
  Half a dozen teetering stacks of books on the desk and the floor. More stacks of file folders, legal pads, marble-cover composition books, and print-outs of articles and drafts. A small snowstorm of Post-it notes and index cards in assorted colors.

  Introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
  Don DeLillo's White Noise.

  Offer a favorite sentence from another writer.
  F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

  Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
  Popeyes fried chicken and TV reruns of The Twilight Zone and Columbo.

  Five Great Memoirs:
  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
  Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
  Out of Egypt by André Aciman
  The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr
  The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  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 and on Instagram.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michiko_Kakutani

  Michiko Kakutani
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Jump to navigationJump to search
  Not to be confused with Michio Kaku.
  Michiko Kakutani
  Michiko Kakutani at Tribeca Disruptive Innovation.jpg
  Michiko Kakutani receiving the 2018 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award
  Born January 9, 1955 (age 63)
  New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
  Other names Michi
  Education Yale University
  Occupation Critic, writer
  Parent(s) Shizuo Kakutani
  Michiko "Michi" Kakutani (角谷 美智子 Kakutani Michiko, born January 9, 1955) is an American literary critic and former chief book critic for The New York Times.

  Contents
  1 Biography
  1.1 Early life
  1.2 Career
  2 Media references
  3 Awards
  4 References
  5 External links
  Biography
  Early life
  Kakutani, a Japanese American, was born on January 9, 1955, in New Haven, Connecticut. She is the only child of Yale mathematician Shizuo Kakutani and his wife Keiko ("Kay") Uchida. While her father was born in Japan, her mother was a second-generation Japanese-American raised in Berkeley, California.[1][2] Michiko received her B.A. in English literature from Yale University in 1976, where she studied under author and Yale writing professor John Hersey, among others.[3]

  Career
  Kakutani initially worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, and then from 1977 to 1979 for Time magazine, where Hersey had worked. In 1979, she joined The New York Times as a reporter.[3]

  Kakutani worked as a literary critic for The New York Times from 1983 until her retirement in 2017.[3] Her periodically harsh reviews of some prominent authors have garnered both attention and, on occasion, criticism. For example, in 2006, Kakutani called Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass". Franzen reportedly subsequently called Kakutani "the stupidest person in New York City".[4][5] Another example is that, in 2012, Kakutani wrote a negative review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile.[6] In 2018, Taleb stated in his book Skin in the Game that "someone has to have read the book to notice that a reviewer is full of baloney, so in the absence of skin in the game, reviewers such as Michiko Kakutani" can "go on forever without anyone knowing" that they are fabricating and drunk.[7] According to Kira Cochrane in The Guardian, such counterattacks may have bolstered Kakutani’s reputation as commendably "fearless".[4]

  She has been known to write reviews in the voice of movie or book characters, including Brian Griffin,[8] Austin Powers,[9] Holden Caulfield,[10] Elle Woods of Legally Blonde,[11] and Truman Capote's character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's.[12]

  On July 19, 2007, The New York Times published a pre-release story written by Kakutani about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. An account of the ensuing controversy, including the critical comments of some Harry Potter fans, can be found on the Times Public Editor's blog.[13]

  Kakutani was parodied in the essay "I Am Michiko Kakutani" by one of her former Yale classmates, Colin McEnroe.[14]

  Kakutani announced that she was stepping down as chief book critic of the Times on July 27, 2017.[5][15] In an article summing her book reviewing career, a writer in Vanity Fair called her "the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world" and credited her with boosting the careers of George Saunders, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith.[5]

  In July 2018, Kakutani published a book criticizing the Trump administration titled The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.[16]

  Kakutani is a fan of the New York Yankees.[17][18] Her aunt, Yoshiko Uchida, was an author of children's books.[1]

  Media references
  A fictionalized account of Kakutani's life entitled "Michiko Kakutani and the Sadness of the World!" was published in the online and print magazine Essays & Fictions.[19]
  She is mentioned in The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J. K. Rowling).
  She is referenced in an episode of the HBO series Sex and the City. In "Critical Condition" (season 5, episode 6), Carrie Bradshaw releases a book that Kakutani reviews. Various characters deem the critic's name "too hard to pronounce," including Miranda Hobbes, who memorably states, "Just don't say her name again — it will drive me over the edge."[20]
  Kakutani is mentioned in an episode of the short-lived ABC sitcom It's Like, You Know... (season 2, episode 4).
  She is mentioned in an episode of HBO's Girls (season 3, episode 5).
  In The Affair, a publisher who wants to print Noah Solloway's second novel tells him that "Michi Kakutani will flip for this, and she hates everything" (season 1, episode 10).
  She is mentioned by Jimmy from the FXX show You're the Worst who says "If you look past Michiko Kakutani's thinly veiled ethnocentrism and scorching ephebiphobia..." when discussing the response to his novel. ("Crevasses": season 2, episode 2)
  She is mentioned in the fourth and final season of The O.C.
  She is mentioned in the novel Purity by Jonathan Franzen as the author of a damning review of a newly released novel.
  Awards
  1998: Pulitzer Prize for Criticism[3]

9/29/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1538268791234 1/3
Print Marked Items
Kakutani, Michiko: THE DEATH OF
TRUTH
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kakutani, Michiko THE DEATH OF TRUTH Tim Duggan Books/Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $22.00 7, 17
ISBN: 978-0-525-57482-8
In our current political and cultural landscape, truth and fact have become the ignored and unloved siblings
of belief and bias.
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Kakutani (The Poet at the Piano: Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights
and Other Artists at Work, 1988), who until recently was the chief book reviewer for the New York Times---
already two black marks against her in the populist playbook: She reads, and she worked for the Times--
offers a dark analysis of the rise of Donald Trump and the fall of any concern for facts. Firmly assertive and
seriously argued (there is little humor here, but given the subject, few will blame the author), her text is also
full of allusions to and quotations from writers and others, including George Orwell, Aldous Huxley,
Richard Hofstadter, William Butler Yeats, David Foster Wallace, and Ayn Rand. One short paragraph
includes references to The Great Gatsby, Fight Club, Michael Houellbecq's "willfully repellent novels," No
Country for Old Men, and the HBO series True Detective. Through it all, Kakutani's strong presence
sometimes disappears in a tangled wood of allusion and quotation. Still, she sees--and ably describes--with
a depressing clarity the dangers of our brave new world. The author charts the decline of reason, the culture
wars, the appeals of Trump and his "dog-whistle racism" (she is relentless in her attacks on the president),
the language of dictators, the skills of Russian internet trolls, the dangers of the digital age, the blather about
"fake news," and, ultimately, the dire threat all of this poses for the democracy we profess to cherish.
Kakutani also reminds us--as if we need reminding--that the German Nazi and Soviet Communist
governments were hideous. Her final note: "without truth, democracy is hobbled."
A stark sermon to the choir that urges each member to sing--loudly and ceaselessly.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kakutani, Michiko: THE DEATH OF TRUTH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd48d4e1.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723461
9/29/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1538268791234 2/3
THE DEATH OF TRUTH
Harvey Freedenberg
BookPage.
(Aug. 2018): p25+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE DEATH OF TRUTH By Michiko Kakutani Tim Duggan $22, 208 pages ISBN 9780525574828
Audio, eBook available
Though Trump likely isn't familiar with these literary theories, Kakutani argues that, in coining terms like
"fake news" and "alternative facts," his allies are cynically employing the same notion of subjectivity to
advance their political agenda. Aided by the right-wing media and highly effective Russian internet trolls,
they've capitalized on America's increasing tribalism and skepticism of traditional sources of expertise,
employing "language as a tool to disseminate distrust and discord."
As she envisions the inevitable post-Trump era, Kakutani is not optimistic. If there's any hope of recovering
from this relentless onslaught of falsehood, it will only come about through the efforts of an engaged
citizenry, insistent on respect for our institutions and, above all, for the truth. Some of the critical
information to fuel that engagement can be found in these pages.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Freedenberg, Harvey. "THE DEATH OF TRUTH." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 25+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547988077/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=55b33447.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547988077
9/29/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1538268791234 3/3
The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood
in the Age of Trump
Publishers Weekly.
265.23 (June 4, 2018): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
Michiko Kakutani. Crown/Duggan, $22 (224p) ISBN 978-0-525-57482-8
Honest, factual debate is expiring at the hands of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, according to this
overwrought jeremiad. Kakutani, the Pulitzer-winning former New York Times book critic, presents a dire
view of discourse in a world of fakery and fanaticism: scientific expertise on topics like climate change gets
attacked as self-interested baloney; Russian disinformation operations churn out fake news that induces
public confusion and sways elections; President Trump lies continually--5.9 times per day, Kakutani
specifies--with impunity; America and the world are divided into warring tribes in ideological bubbles
impermeable to objective data or civilized discussion. Kakutani blames not just the populist right but the
postmodern, literary theory of the academic left--formerly subversive critical stances that, she argues, have
bequeathed a nihilistic rejection of reason and Enlightenment values. Citing writers including Hannah
Arendt, George Orwell, and David Foster Wallace, Kakutani offers a sophisticated, wide-ranging
exploration of theories of propaganda and debased speech and their insidious effects. Unfortunately, she
takes her critique to extremes, likening Trump to Hitler, Lenin, and Mussolini, conjuring omnipotent
conspiracies of Kremlin-backed tweeters, and spying totalitarian portents everywhere. Like much antiTrump
ire, Kakutani's polemic trades in the same histrionics that it deplores. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 47.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242895/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5239b996. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542242895

"Kakutani, Michiko: THE DEATH OF TRUTH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. Freedenberg, Harvey. "THE DEATH OF TRUTH." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 25+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547988077/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. "The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242895/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/books/review/michiko-kakutani-death-of-truth.html
  Word count: 1409

  NONFICTION

  Chris Hayes Reviews Michiko Kakutani’s Book About Our Post-Truth Era
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  By Chris Hayes
  July 18, 2018

  36
  THE DEATH OF TRUTH
  Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
  By Michiko Kakutani
  208 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $22.

  The president is a liar. He lies about matters of the utmost consequence (nuclear diplomacy) and about the most trivial (his golf game). He lies about things you can see with your own eyes. He lies about things he said just moments ago. He lies the way a woodpecker attacks a tree: compulsively, insistently, instinctively. He lies until your temples throb. He lies until you want to submerge your head in a bucket of ice and pray for release.

  And yet millions of Americans either believe what he says or delight in his obvious deceptions. One of the country’s two major political coalitions is devoted to justifying and defending those lies to the point of absurdity. Republicans will argue all at once that the president is not tearing immigrant children from their parents, that he is doing it but it’s necessary to deter future immigrants, that the children aren’t really the children of those who are bringing them but rather coached to pretend they are by smugglers, and that Obama did the same thing and now Donald Trump has mercifully ended the practice. It feels very much as if something has ripped in the fabric of reality of America at this moment.

  “The Death of Truth,” by the former Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, attempts to make some sense of our present epistemic crisis. The book’s subtitle is “Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump,” and the emphasis should be on “notes.” This is a slim, quick read that at its best feels like a kind of annotated syllabus for a popular college class with a charismatic teacher, the kind that would be oversubscribed two minutes past midnight. At its worst, it feels like spending a few hours scrolling through the #Resist hashtag on Twitter.

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  A central challenge for anyone attempting to make sense of our current predicament is figuring out what is distinct about the age of Trump (what is, to use a popular phrase, “not normal”) and what is a continuation of previous trends. What is a difference in kind and what is a difference in degree. The title, “The Death of Truth,” implies truth was alive before, and that this era signals its demise. But anyone who lived through the George W. Bush years and the Iraq war (something Kakutani devotes a few pages to), or has spent any time reading American history, knows that official deception about the most important matters of life and death is by no means a new phenomenon.

  Kakutani’s argument is that Trump is not only new and different and terrifying because of his lies, but also that he is the “bizarro-world apotheosis” of a variety of political, cultural and attitudinal impulses, trends and traditions that have waxed and waned throughout American and global history. Age-old authoritarian methods and impulses facilitated by new technology and the media landscape, in tandem with the growing polarization of the electorate, have brought us somewhere we in the United States haven’t quite been before. Trump, she writes, is “emblematic of dynamics that have been churning beneath the surface of daily life for years, creating the perfect ecosystem in which Veritas, the goddess of truth … could fall mortally ill.”

  Image
  Kakutani is, obviously, nothing if not well read, but the book is so full of citations and allusions it can almost feel as though the author’s own argument is getting lost, if there is an original argument to be found at all. There are references to Orwell, Arendt, Tocqueville, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Philip Roth, Neil Postman, Tom Wolfe, along with contemporary writers on the politics of truth and polarization from Masha Gessen to Tim Wu. There are references to Twitter trolls, a gloss on Putin and dezinformatsiya, and a brief excursus on Derrida, deconstruction and postmodernism.

  The best moments come from unnerving historical nuggets and finds, like this great Arendt observation that “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

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  Pretty on point! But, then, when you read that, you just kind of want to go and read Arendt, rather than end up in the next paragraph with a quick summary of a RAND Corporation report that calls Putin’s method of propaganda a “fire hose of falsehood.” And when Kakutani tries to articulate in her own words just what it is we are witnessing at this moment in time, as new authoritarian forms of manipulation take root across the globe, her descriptions fall flat. “Choose your metaphor,” she writes about Putin’s method, “muddying the waters, throwing chum to the sharks, cranking up the fog machine, flinging gorilla dust in the public’s eyes: It’s a tactic designed to create adrenal fatigue and news exhaustion.” For a passage about obfuscation, this is not particularly clarifying.

  Kakutani’s kitchen sink approach means that the profound and banal all end up occupying space next to one another, the president’s insidious assaults on the rule of law on one hand and “covfefe” on the other. The result is a book that feels both undertheorized and overly familiar, a book that somehow recreates the vaguely nauseated-after-an-amusement-park-ride feel that the dizzying news cycle itself induces day after day.

  Maybe that’s really the central problem here. Maybe the toxic individual who has succeeded in monopolizing the attention of the nation and (to a large degree) the world is himself a kind of black hole of insight, a vortex of meaning.

  That’s not just a problem for Kakutani’s project, of course. Given my job, I am forced to ask myself every day: Is it possible to say anything truly profound or new about Donald Trump at this moment in time? He is describable, almost fully, in a few short words: a misogynist, a bigot, a narcissist, a con man and a demagogue. And his behavior, like the woodpecker, feels instinctual and feral: a deeply broken man who hammers away moment to moment trying to repair his own brokenness, and leaving nothing but a hole.

  What sense is there to be made of it all? Our collective ability to reason with one another, to recognize what is plainly in front of our faces, to reach consensus on the most obvious of matters does seem imperiled as never before. It is the very nature of our current crisis that the sensory overload and resulting mental exhaustion make clarity, specificity and precision all the more urgent. “The Death of Truth” honors that project without really succeeding in executing it.

  Chris Hayes is the host of “All In” on MSNBC.

  A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2018, on Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: What Trump Hath Wrought. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/29/death-of-truth-michiko-kakutani-review-polemic-wont-burst-trumps-balloon
  Word count: 944

  The Death of Truth review – a polemic that won’t burst Trump’s balloon
  Michiko Kakutani’s high-minded study of the intellectual crisis that has gripped the west is a disappointment
  Peter Conrad

  Sun 29 Jul 2018 03.00 EDT

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  Ridicule would be a better weapon against Trump than the sociological mantras Kakutani uses.
  Ridicule would be a better weapon against Trump than the sociological mantras Kakutani uses. Photograph: Getty Images
  The resistance to Trump is currently tripped up by a disagreement over rhetorical tactics. The question, to use Michelle Obama’s terms, is whether to go high or low – to invoke the lofty constitutional principles Trump violates or to stoop to his own mud-wrestling tactics and call him a liar and (who knows?) perhaps a criminal, as well as a fraud, an oaf, a sleazy groper and an egomaniac as absurdly puffed-up as the nappy-clad balloon that bobbed above Westminster during his visit earlier this month.

  In this account of the mental malaise that made Trump possible, Michiko Kakutani chooses to go high, or highbrow. She explains him as a postmodern phenomenon, a product of the deconstructionist assault on absolutes that raged through American universities in the 1980s: Trump’s erstwhile tactician Steve Bannon, co-opting leftist jargon for the “alt-right”, describes his mission as “the deconstruction of the administrative state”, which means replacing governance with a paranoid reign of chaos.

  Kakutani even relates Trump’s chronic mendacity to the slippery tricks of once-trendy literary critics who, beguiled by the theorist Jacques Derrida, argued that all statements are relative, or ironically reversible. This pedigree hardly befits a dimwit who boasts of never opening a book, didn’t write those published in his name and can’t stop watching television long enough to read the daily security briefings prepared by his advisers.

  Trump, obsessed with visibility, prefers to dispense with bothersome words. After television interviews, he often asks for a playback with the sound turned off: his concern, according to the NBC journalist Chuck Todd, is “to see what it all looked like”, so he watches “on mute”. What he says doesn’t matter, so long as his teased and tinted quiff remains unruffled, his orange tan unblotched.

  The literary life of Michiko Kakutani: the book critic's best feuds and reviews
  Read more
  The outrage and contempt Kakutani feels are warranted, but her philosophical attitude to the Trump phenomenon leaves her wallowing out of her depth, despite the onerous booklist she attaches to her slim essay. The decades she spent as chief book reviewer for the New York Times have made her adept at slicing and dicing the ideas of others and every second paragraph here is a quotation from one of the authorities she consults. Because she relies on a liberal consensus, the same points are numbingly made over and over again. She bangs on about “filter bubbles” in social media and the “content silos” in which Twitter users immure themselves; she is equally relentless about the Russian “troll factories” and “bot armies” that disseminated lies during the 2016 election campaign. Buzzwords recur so often that I worried about suffering tinnitus while reading.

  More than once, Kakutani claims that Brexit is Trumpism by other means, yet Trump’s racial and religious bigotry is surely uglier and crasser than any of the deluded falsehoods promulgated by the Leave campaign. Brexiters are nostalgic fantasists, in retreat from a larger world; Trumptards seek to uphold America’s swaggering dominance in that world, if necessary by destabilising sovereign nations and disrupting their alliances. Brexit is an isolated act of suicide, at worst pathetic and pitiable, whereas Trumpism fondly contemplates genocide. Members of Kakutani’s family, as she recalled in a recent article, were sent to internment camps for Japanese-Americans set up in California after Pearl Harbor, a prototype for the cages in which Trump’s enforcers have penned the children of illegal immigrants in Texas and Arizona.

  The book’s best pages deal with Putin’s propagandist Vladislav Surkov, a former trainee theatre director and advertising executive who currently stage-manages the Kremlin’s black arts of make-believe and, as one of Kakutani’s sources puts it, keeps Russians “reeling with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan, fascists and the CIA”, just as Trump ignites his zealots by excoriating Mexican rapists, Muslim jihadists and European freeloaders who rob Uncle Sam’s piggybank. The ideological differences of the cold war have been erased; now the shared concern of the kleptocrats in Washington and Moscow is “power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth”.

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  Elsewhere, Kakutani’s sociological mantras and indignant anathemata are repeated helplessly or even desperately, in an unwitting case of the “confirmation bias” that she officially deplores. Liberal guerrillas will have to do better than this if they hope to salvage American democracy. Ridicule, employed so effectively by the carnivalesque demonstrators who dogged Trump during his trip to the UK, would be a more effective weapon: a man who lacks humour and the humanity it vouches for has a mortal terror of being laughed at. Mikhail Bakhtin, a literary theorist absent from Kakutani’s bibliography, thought that the festive mockery of a mob could bring about “the defeat of power, of all that oppresses and restricts”. Perhaps it will be the pin from the inflatable Trump baby’s diaper that punctures Potus, letting out the hot air that keeps him aloft.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/07/19/630104963/without-breaking-new-ground-the-death-of-truth-is-convincing
  Word count: 826

  REVIEW
  BOOK REVIEWS
  Without Breaking New Ground, 'The Death Of Truth' Is Convincing
  July 19, 20184:11 PM ET
  MICHAEL SCHAUB

  The Death of Truth by Michko Kakutani
  Samantha Clark/NPR
  Ever since the election of Donald Trump as president, pundits have written obituaries for just about every virtue there is. The president's victory and the policies he's enacted, some commentators have argued, has marked the death of civility, tolerance, dignity, freedom and the American dream itself.

  In her new book, former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani suggests that truth should be added to the list of casualties of the Trump administration, asking, "How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance?"

  The Death of Truth is a slim volume that's equally intriguing and frustrating, an uneven effort from a writer who is, nonetheless, always interesting to read.

  Kakutani's book is as much a work of cultural criticism as it is a denunciation of the 45th president, whom she calls "a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses." Unsurprisingly, Kakutani turns to literature in her attempt to make sense of the post-truth Trump era. She contends that America is in the midst of a period marked by what author and historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style" of politics — that is, an obsession with conspiracy theories and a pervasive-but-baseless sense of values under attack.

  So far, so good, but then Kakutani pivots to postmodernism to explain the rhetoric of Trump and his supporters. Quoting from a 2005 David Foster Wallace article about the increase of news outlets, Kakutani writes that the late novelist's words "uncannily predict the post-Trump cultural landscape, where truth increasingly seems to be in the eye of the beholder, facts are fungible and socially constructed, and we often feel as if we've been transported to an upside-down place where assumptions and alignments in place for decades have suddenly been turned inside out."

  Postmodernism and its cousin, deconstruction, have ushered in an era of nihilism and relativism, Kakutani contends, though she stops short of blaming the movement for the rise of Trump. "[S]ome dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking have seeped into popular culture and been hijacked by the president's defenders, who want to use its relativistic arguments to excuse his lies, and by right-wingers who want to question evolution or deny the reality of climate change or promote alternative facts."

  It's intriguing, if not entirely convincing. Deceit in politics and fiery reactionary rhetoric predate postmodernism, and it's fair to say that the majority of those showing up at Trump's rallies (or the majority of people in general) don't make it a habit to read the works of philosopher Jacques Derrida. To be fair, Kakutani acknowledges this, but the connection she draws between postmodernism and Trumpism still seems too tenuous to be of much use.

  The Death of Truth
  The Death of Truth
  Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

  by Michiko Kakutani

  Hardcover, 208 pages purchase

  Kakutani finds herself on stronger footing when she discusses the linguistics behind Trump's speeches and tweets. The president is often criticized for rambling and using vague language; Kakutani notes that "[p]recise words ... mean little to Trump." And she addresses Trump's frequent misspellings on Twitter, arguing that his typos "are indicative of his impulsive, live-in-the-moment, can't-think-about-the-fallout posture." ("Covfefe," of course, makes an always-entertaining appearance in this chapter.) And she makes the case that Trump is essentially an Internet troll — but it's an observation that is hardly original.

  Unfortunately, that's the case with so much of The Death of Truth. Kakutani is clearly sharp, and her arguments can be convincing. But nothing in the book breaks new ground. That's one consequence of having a president who is strongly criticized by many: There are only so many ways to call Trump a liar — and that particular well has been dry for a while now. That's not to say it's pointless to point out the president's dishonesty, but journalists have been doing that in real time since the beginning of Trump's campaign.

  The Death of Truth isn't a bad book by any means. Kakutani is a remarkable writer, one of the best living American literary critics, and she has a gift for memorable turns of phrases — at one point, she compares Trump to a "manic cartoon artist's mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière."

  As an overview of Trump's famously tenuous relationship with the truth, it's perfectly serviceable, but as a cultural criticism of Trumpism and the state of veracity in America today, it never really gets off the ground.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-kakutani-death-of-truth-20180713-story.html
  Word count: 1245

  BOOKS
  Michiko Kakutani turns to Donald Trump and fake news in 'The Death of Truth'
  Carolyn Kellogg
  By CAROLYN KELLOGG
  | BOOKS EDITOR |
  JUL 13, 2018 | 10:30 AM

  Michiko Kakutani turns to Donald Trump and fake news in 'The Death of Truth'
  Michiko Kakutani's book is 'The Death of Truth.' (Petr Hlinomaz)

  Michiko Kakutani had the best literary criticism job in America. As chief book critic for the New York Times, she could review any book she wanted and won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1998. She used the word “limn” so much that it became a book reviewing cliché. Everyone in publishing read her, craving rave reviews (as she gave Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”) and fearing an ice-cold takedown (as she gave Franzen’s memoir “The Discomfort Zone”). So why, after 38 years at the paper, walk away from the gig?

  The answer lies in “The Death of Truth,” her first book. At the end of its first chapter, she turns her attention to Stefan Zweig’s 1942 memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” which chronicled growing up in Austria and Hitler’s rise: “because they were reluctant to abandon their accustomed lives, their daily routines and habits, Zweig wrote, people did not want to believe how rapidly their freedoms were being stolen.” Kaktuani abandoned her accustomed life in order, this book shows, to raise an alarm about Donald Trump.

  That alarm — that President Trump presents a danger to our democratic institutions — may sound familiar. It’s in countless articles by experts in law, commerce, voting rights, the environment and so on, as well as other books. In “The Death of Truth,” Kakutani looks at the fragmenting cultural discourse that preceded Trump, the role of the internet in our lives and politics, Russian interference in the U.S. and abroad, the degradation of language, highlights from Trump’s first year in office and, of course, fake news.

  What Kakutani brings to the narrative is her wide literary referent and an ability to nail an opponent with flair. “If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump — a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses,” she writes, “she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.”

  Donald Trump at the EU Nato Summit, Brussels, Belgium July 12, 2018
  Donald Trump at the EU Nato Summit, Brussels, Belgium July 12, 2018 (Christian Bruna/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

  Looking back, she draws parallels between the regimes of Hitler in Germany and Lenin in Russia and Trump — particularly regarding their mass appeal, scapegoating and manipulation of language. She references books, such as those by historian Anne Applebaum and political theorist Hannah Arendt, in framing her observations. In explaining how social media can both be manipulated and manipulate us, she quotes virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier and Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing appeal of the early 1960s (“America has been largely taken away from them”) is a touchstone for her understanding of Trump supporters today.

  She includes novelists in her cultural tour: George Orwell for doublespeak, F. Scott Fitzgerald for greed, Thomas Pynchon for paranoia, David Foster Wallace for irony and insincerity, Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth for just about anything.

  In 2010, historian Tony Judt published “Ill Fares the Land,” a slender yet comprehensive look at 20th and 21st century economic and political thought and practice, drawing connections and illustrating how one idea led to another, sometimes with inverse intention, an intellectual through line that demonstrated cause and effect. This is the kind of book I hoped Kakutani might write.

  However, I should have paid more attention to the subtitle: Calling it “Notes” is accurate. This is an assemblage of observations of what is happening in America.

  'The Death of Truth' by Michiko Kakutani
  'The Death of Truth' by Michiko Kakutani (Tim Duggan Books)

  These observations are not meant to convince but to create nods of assent. I’m guessing that most readers who pick up a book critical of Trump by the former New York Times book critic will have noticed that Fox News has many viewers and that they probably aren’t among them. They know that climate change is real. They will have, like the author, decried Trump’s tweets. They support Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. They keep up on the news and maybe are even newspaper subscribers.

  Analysis of these events happens every day in newspapers and online, on the radio, in podcasts and on television. There is little analysis here, and the book feels thirsty for it.

  When Kakutani does venture political analysis, she can misstep. “For many of these committed partisans, supporting their party was like being a rabid, die-hard fan of a favorite NBA, MLB or NFL team; it was part of their own identity, and their team could do no wrong,” she writes. “Polarized voting in Congress mirrored these developments.” That’s mistaking correlation for causation.

  She’s on much better footing when she’s looking at the world through books. The passages she pulls from Zweig about life in Germany and Austria during Hitler’s rise are striking. So too is what she takes from Victor Klemperer and his diaries, “I Will Bear Witness,” focusing on the German-Jewish linguist’s real-time take — from Dresden — on the decay of language in the Nazi era.

  In a weird literary theory fillip that I and only a handful of other readers may care about, Kakutani lays a surprising measure of the blame for fake news on postmodernism. The theory popularized by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault is based in the idea that word and meaning are inherently separate; it led to, or described, all kinds of play in literary fiction (see the works of William S. Burroughs, Pynchon and Don DeLillo). Where she might have tracked money and right-wing think politics (via a book such as Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”), the role of race and racism (with the help of a book such has Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”) or the widening gap between rich and poor (using “Capital” by Thomas Piketty) — postmodernism is instead in her sights throughout.

  In the final chapter, which focuses on Russia and its involvement in America’s 2016 election, Kakutani describes the “contemporary Russian master of propaganda Vladislav Surkov” as “a former postmodernist theater director who’s been called ‘the real genius of the Putin era.’” So deep is her antipathy that she credits “recruiting a real American to hold a sign depicting Clinton and a phony [alienating] quotation attributed to her” to postmodern “Surkovian stagecraft,” rather than recognizing its American antecedents in Nixon’s dirty tricksters.

  So far, Kakutani’s move from book critic to political observer is only partially successful. She’s best when she sticks to smart texts. As a person who lives inside this world of books, I had hoped her vision on the world would be clearer. Apparently, it’s not easy lifting your focus from the page.

  Kellogg is books editor of The Times.

  ::

  “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump”

  Michiko Kakutani

  Tim Duggan Books: 208 pp., $22

• San Francisco Chronicle
  https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/The-Death-of-Truth-by-Michiko-Kakutani-13091991.php
  Word count: 1043

  ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT // BOOKS
  ‘The Death of Truth,’ by Michiko Kakutani
  By Louis P. Masur July 20, 2018 Updated: July 20, 2018 1:26 p.m.
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  of 2Michiko Kakutani, author of “The Death of Truth.”Photo: Petr Hlinomaz

  2
  of 2“The Death of Truth”Photo: Tim Duggan Books
  Donald Trump lies. This is not news. Multiple media outlets keep track of his lies — in May, the list topped 3,000 falsehoods over 466 days in office. Many are innocuous, though revealing. For example, his claim that more people attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s. Others are more pernicious, such as his assertion that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election on 2016. On the PolitiFact scorecard, most of what he says falls into the categories “mostly false,” “false” and “pants on fire.”

  No wonder that in her pointed and penetrating book, Michiko Kakutani laments the death of truth. Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former chief book critic for the New York Times, draws on her vast literary knowledge (she quotes dozens of writers, from Hannah Arendt to Tom Wolfe) to pen truth’s obituary in the era of Trump.

  Kakutani is not the first to narrate the mendacious behavior of Trump, but she is one of the sharpest to do so, writing with clarity and force about the president’s “assault on language,” which is “not confined to a torrent of lies, but extends to his taking of words and principles intrinsic to the rule of law and contaminating them with personal agendas and political partisanship.”

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  That “assault on language” has a long history, and Kakutani discusses some of the sources for the current retreat from truth. A chief culprit, she argues, is the rise of cultural relativism, which she traces to the emergence of deconstruction and the postmodern turn in the aftermath of the 1960s. In this scenario, the critical tools first used by the left to reveal that hegemonic ideologies are filtered through various lenses — chief among them class, race and gender — were in turn appropriated by the populist right. When Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway spoke of “alternative facts,” she might as well have been quoting philosopher Jacques Derrida, who argued that truth was constructed.

  Of course, the questioning of facts and truth traces back much farther than the 1960s, indeed as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Philosophers have always debated objectivity, rationality and empiricism. More germane to the moment is Kakutani’s discussion of how authoritarian regimes manipulate language “to disseminate distrust and discord.” George Orwell seized on this in his description of Newspeak in “1984.” Trump’s “twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith, and his inflammatory bombast,” observes Kakutani, are “both emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s tool kit.”

  So too his indifference to spelling, which encapsulates a rejection of agreed-upon rules and the value of education: “unpresidented,” “honered,” “boarder” — the list goes on. This is more than just typos, inexcusable in a freshman term paper no less than from the president of the United States. Neglecting to correct spelling bespeaks a broader hostility toward accuracy, knowledge and learning. In Trump’s mental landscape there are no facts — only feelings, instincts, passions and desires.

  More Information
  The Death of Truth

  Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

  By Michiko Kakutani

  (Tim Duggan Books; 208 pages; $22)

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  Trump, Kakutani notes, is “as much a symptom of the times as he is a dangerous catalyst.” She points with particular disdain to the ascent of narcissistic self-absorption, from the “me decade” of the 1970s to the current age of the selfie. When personal grievances met social media, Trump’s supporters found their incubator. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accelerated the creation of what one study called “insulated knowledge communities” that allow for the transmission of a “hyper-partisan perspective to the world.” In this environment, actual news and information (whether about climate change or gun violence) get derided as “fake news,” while outlandish conspiracy theories, such as “pizzagate,” gain purchase with those who subscribe to the right-wing media.

  Liberals have their own information silos, and Democrats as well as Republicans accept fake news headlines as true (though at a smaller percentage). The left, however, seems to continue to value objective analysis and empirical evidence in ways rejected by the alt-right. The anti-intellectualism of the moment is frightening (Trump disdains experts). But education and democracy go hand in hand, and Kakutani warns against the erosion of democratic norms by “Trump’s lies, his efforts to redefine reality, [and] his violation of norms and rules and traditions.” She also fears that exhaustion is setting in among Trump’s critics, and warns that “outrage fatigue” has the baneful effect of allowing the lies to proliferate and pass unchallenged.

  “The Death of Truth” offers a clear-eyed, eloquent assessment of the current predicament. For those who may think criticism of Trump is overblown, this book is essential for understanding the corrosive effects of an ongoing, relentless assault on truth.

  Unfortunately, Kakutani can suggest little by way of remedy. Indeed, she expects that Trump’s departure “will not restore truth to health and well-being.” Perhaps we can take solace from her discussion of Victor Klemperer’s study of the use of language in the Third Reich. Klemperer, a German Jew best known for a diary he kept in Dresden from 1933 to 1945, argued that the Nazi regime’s lies and falsehoods ultimately became “meaningless and utterly ineffective, finally bringing about a belief in the very opposite of what it intended.” One can only hope.

  Louis P. Masur is Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University and author of “Lincoln’s Last Speech” (2015) and “The Civil War: A Concise History” (2011). Email: books@sfchronicle.com

• AV Club
  https://aux.avclub.com/legendary-critic-michiko-kakutani-reviews-all-the-presi-1827492427
  Word count: 817

  REVIEWS
  Legendary critic Michiko Kakutani reviews all the president’s lies in The Death Of Truth

  Rien Fertel
  7/16/18 1:00pmFiled to: BOOK REVIEW
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  Graphic: Emma McKhann
  If the role of the critic is to “educate the public,” as Oscar Wilde once wrote, Michiko Kakutani couldn’t have picked a worse time to retire from her post as chief book critic of The New York Times last July. Sure, serving for three decades as arguably the most important gatekeeper in literary publishing warrants a break. A whole calendar of deadline-less weeks must have sounded divine. A buyout beckoned. There are books to write, still more books to read and reread, maybe even, as they say, for fun!

  BOOK REVIEW
  Lead
  B+
  The Death Of Truth: Notes On Falsehood In The Age Of Trump
  AUTHOR
  Michiko Kakutani

  PUBLISHER
  Tim Duggan Books

  But couldn’t Kakutani, who will likely be remembered as one of history’s most essential, beloved, feared, and reviled cultural critics, have waited another three years? Couldn’t this immensely private writer, who famously never uses the first-person pronoun in her work, yet whose name often pops up as public fodder—she’s the only Pulitzer Prize winner name-dropped on Sex And The City, The O.C., and Girls—have helped us through 2020, when the more reasonable among us might once again welcome a president who privileges empathy over narcissism, unification over demagoguery, democracy over totalitarianism, and, perhaps above all else, the joy of reading books.

  Thankfully, Kakutani hasn’t completely relinquished her critic’s post. In The Death Of Truth: Notes On Falsehood In The Age Of Trump, she takes a brief but potent dive into our era’s decline of reason, distortion of reality, prevalence of disinformation, and the vile little man fomenting much of it all. It’s a book delivered with a built-in audience, one hungering for the kakistocracy that is the Trump presidency to get Kakutanied with the same intellectual rigor and ruthless humor she once administered to Norman Mailer, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, and Bill Clinton, among many others.

  The belief that ignorance is now fashionable lies at the heart of Kakutani’s book. The banality of truth defines the present moment. Conservatives once embraced red-baiting; “alt-righters” now get high on red-pilling. Alarmingly, Kakutani writes, the “roots of falsehood” originate from the same novelistic and postmodernist playbooks that she, alongside the academic and intellectual circles loathed by the right, uphold as culturally and politically vital. Like the French deconstructionists before them, American conservatives treat language, science, and narrative as unstable forms. Rereading these goons here makes Donald Rumsfeld’s bullshit farrago from two presidencies past—“known knowns,” “known unknowns,” “unknown unknowns”—sound like Derrida. Newt Gingrich to CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota on the subject of FBI crime data: “The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics which theoretically may be right, but it’s not where human beings are… As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.” Rush Limbaugh on science: “Scientists wear white lab coats and they look really official [but] they’re frauds. They’re bought and paid for by the left.” Trump on fascist protestors and counter-protesters: “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.”

  For those who haven’t read every article, essay, and book about the current presidential regime, Kakutani breaks it down, all in fewer than 175 pages: Trump’s 5.9 lies, on average, per day. Websites for government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency plainly announcing that they would be “updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership.” Trump’s commemorative presidential coins replacing “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one) with “Make America Great Again.”

  Throughout, the author digs deep into her literary reference bag of tricks to diagnose our nation’s many ills. The president, she writes, in a sentence that’s pure Kakutani, resembles a “mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière.” The national mood is compared to “the indigenous American berserk,” after Philip Roth. T.S. Eliot gives voice to “this twittering world” of internet-addled junkies, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” The imaginary world made real at the center of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” becomes the MAGA, Russia, Bowling Green trifecta that defines Trump’s post-truth presidency.

  But for all it offers, The Death Of Truth can’t help but feel a bit skimpy, a rush job riding the wave of anti-Trump books. Enjoy your retirement, but please don’t abandon us, Kakutani. We need the critic as much as we need books.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michiko-kakutani/the-poet-at-the-piano-portraits-of-writers-film/
  Word count: 190

  THE POET AT THE PIANO: Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, and Other Artists at Work by Michiko Kakutani
  THE POET AT THE PIANO: PORTRAITS OF WRITERS, FILMMAKERS, PLAYWRIGHTS, AND OTHER ARTISTS AT WORK
  By
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  From the pages of the New York Times, short essays--more sketches than full-fledged portraits--on 36 celebrated creators, by a prominent Times book critic. A classic-style journalist, Kakutani never lets her prose obscure the subject; fluid, simple, direct, her takes on authors (from Bellow to Wiesel), film directors (Bergman to Wilder), playwrights and producers (Feiffer to Wilson), and performers (Ellington to Olivier and Plowright) highlight each artist's career and vision in brief, telling strokes. Kakutani's insights rarely astonish, but she presents the obvious clearly (i.e., of Billy Wilder, ""More often than not, his movies involve elaborate deceptions ending in loss of innocence""), and salts most of the sketches with extensive fragments of conversation between herself and the subject. An elegant, light, enjoyable survey.

  Pub Date: June 10th, 1988
  Publisher: Times Books

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780812912777
  Word count: 193

  Poet at the Piano
  Michiko Katutani, Author, Michiko Kakutani, Author Crown Publishers $18.95 (247p) ISBN 978-0-8129-1277-7

  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  New York Times book critic Kakutani here gathers 35 interviews, mostly published between 1979 and 1987, of people whose work has become part of the cultural vernacular. Included are David Byrne, Laurence Olivier, Joan Didion, Stephen Sondheim, John Updike and Mary McCarthy. Some of the ``portraits'' have the fleeting, ephemeral quality of old snapshotsvaluable as a record of an event, but now dated and fuzzy: Milan Kundera, for example, had just published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and gives no hint that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in the works; Steven Spielberg discusses his ``breakthrough'' film, E.T. Other intervieweesnotably Saul Bellow and Jorge Luis Borgessurvive the topical constraints of news reporting and speak of their craft in ways that cannot be ascribed to a specific time and place. For such moments, in which Kakutani offers the artists an opportunity to discuss elements of their creativity, even these hurried glimpses are worth a closer look. (June)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 06/03/1988
  Release date: 06/01/1988

• Los Angeles Times
  http://articles.latimes.com/1988-07-03/books/bk-8952_1_interview-situation
  Word count: 311

  THE POET AT THE PIANO Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, and Other Artists at Work by Michiko Kakutani (Times Books: $18.95)
  July 03, 1988|SONJA BOLLE

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  The 38 interviews in this volume were originally published (with one exception) in the New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani is a book critic and cultural affairs correspondent. The title of the collection (a bow to Wallace Stevens) gives the unifying theme to the interviews; their intention is to catch artists at work. The interviews are grouped in four sections: authors, directors, playwrights and producers, and performers. All those profiled are well-known figures, and one needn't be in any inner circle to recognize every name on the list. This is in a sense refreshing, but it also gives a rather uniform glow of limelight to the volume. Among the artists included are: Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Nadine Gordimer, Elie Wiesel, Milan Kundera, Steven Spielberg, Louis Malle, Martin Scorsese, David Byrne, Tennessee Williams, Jules Feiffer, John Gielgud, Liza Minnelli and Lena Horne.

  The pieces sew together good quotes with the journalist's observations of details that allow a reader to feel present at the interview. In her introduction, the author makes clear her interest in the dialogue or interview situation itself: Norman Mailer "apparently sees (interviews) as a forum from which he can sound off." John Updike, on the other hand, "seems to regard them as contributions to the public record, contrived but useful situations in which 'one is forced to say things' 'not always said elsewhere.' " The interviewer's tape recorder is an obvious presence, as she regularly notes revealing habits of speech. Of Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington's son, she writes: "His ambivalence toward his father is reflected by the fact that he sometimes refers to him as 'Pop,' sometimes as simply 'Ellington.' "

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