Much of Gorbachev's discussion hinges on East-West relations, particularly between Russia and the United States. This is logical, as certain interests of pre-Soviet Russia were taken up by the Soviet Union, and, post-Soviet collapse, these same interests were transferred to the nascent Russian Federation (and carried on to the present).While there is a brief chapter covering both China and India, with a brief discussion of Malaysia included, the discussion borders on the facile.

During the course of advising Trump, all three found their recommendations denied or contradicted in later public statements or tweets. The intelligence agencies were widely and publicly assailed by Trump, most famously in his comments about his private meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, in which he seemed to publicly accept Putin’s denial of election interference and his distrust of his own intelligence services. 

Some people, dancers mostly, knew him as a savior—the person who kept them dancing, or stopped their back pain, or put a zip in their step, or some other career enhancing or enabling therapy. He helped professional golfers eliminate pain in their swing; he helped hairdressers and barbers work pain-free all day with their arms raised. He improved singers’ breath control. As the person who worked his obscure magic to solve a physical problem that ofttimes doctors, chiropractors, or massage therapists couldn’t, he was a medicine man.

So what would have happened if the federal government had acted with the degree of vigilance that we had come to expect from the Ebola crisis and other pandemic threats? What if those sweeping measures imposed on or after March 15 — a federal warning against large gatherings, health screenings at airports, states of emergency declared, etc. - had been announced one or two weeks earlier?

The stories in his new collection, In the Valley, are set primarily in Appalachian. They plunge the reader into challenging, sometimes life-threatening situations that often resolve in surprising ways. Stacy, a mentally fragile park ranger, must hold her own against a lawbreaker twice her size in “Flight.” During the last days of the Civil War, a widow named Rebecca is confronted by a gang of violent Confederates, in “Neighbors.” A young man named Brent takes drastic action when a rich client cheats Brent’s blue-collar father out of money owed in “When All Stars Fall.”

They crept into Bologna, the first of the cities of the north. There were recruits here too. Very far from the dove-grey university, down a long stark warehouse avenue, they were being marched by military police. There was no band here, no gold and blue officer, no priest. There were women, girls to ancient, a ragged pack of shawls and dirty aprons, shrieking and throwing what came handy, from cabbage stalks to bricks, at the police. Pretty often, the recruits got hit as well.

The Glass Hotel revolves around two events:  the collapse of a Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi scheme in 2008 and, years later, a woman falling (or being pushed) from the deck of a container ship at sea. In between swirl a variety of interconnected subplots and a host of living, breathing secondary characters. And, as with Station Eleven, the author enjoys (and is seemingly peerless at) shuffling time and point of view in ways that subtly enrich the text, while never disorienting the reader as to where and what is going on.

These questions, while separate, are indelibly intertwined. If the American people react to Donald Trump’s presidency with even a fraction of the disgust and anger the two of us feel, he’s almost sure to be a one-term president. But if we intend to sustain a Democratic governing majority over the long term, we’ll need an agenda (and an accompanying narrative) that stands on its own. Without a compelling message, we won’t be able to hold on to the power that the public’s revulsion to Trump may help us win. Then we’ll be back at square one.

Jeanine Cummins’s novel, American Dirt, appeared early in 2020, drawing initial excitement and laudatory reviews. Soon, the book came under attack, with accusations and recriminations revolving around the issue of cultural appropriation. Critics questioned Cummins’s legitimacy and ability to write a novel about a Mexican mother and child on the run from a vicious drug cartel. Protests followed and a host of publicity events and television appearances were canceled.

At the time of my first trial, however, “sink or swim” was the reality, and I accepted it unquestioningly. Accordingly, I was assigned a veritable “slam dunk” case involving an undercover drug “buy and bust” with two defendants, the brothers Calvin and Reginald Smith. All I had to do was call the undercover narcotics agent, have him testify to his dealings with the defendants at their meeting in a JFK Airport hotel, introduce into evidence the drugs the defendants had given him, and then call a government chemist to testify that the drugs seized were indeed illegal narcotic substances.