RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trump’s earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Black’s aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

Black is neither a hagiographer nor an ankle-biter. He seeks to understand Trump within the three prominent landscapes in which Americans had come to know their new president: politics, the celebrity world, and the cannibalistic arena of high-stakes Manhattan real estate and finance. Of the three, Black is most jaded about the anti-Trump hysteria within the first two, not because the real estate business is inherently a nobler profession, but because it more often lacks the moral preening and hypocrisies of both the beltway and tabloids. The result is an argument that the first president to have neither prior political nor military service nevertheless has his own demonstrable skill sets that are making his presidency far more dynamic than either his critics or supporters quite imagined. Black’s unspoken assumption is that it is more difficult to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than to be a career politician or an evening news reader.

In Trump’s rise and fall and rise as a billionaire, Black never whitewashes his ruthlessness, his fast and loose relationship with the truth (e.g., “He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths”), and his occasionally tawdry P. T. Barnum hawking.

I first became aware of Tom Wolfe, who died Monday at 88, when an English teacher at my Jesuit high school in Maine turned me on to (classical reference in that phrase) his 1975 exercise in New Journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

Wow. I mean WOW! South Portland, Maine, had never encountered anything like it. Shakespeare, yes. Dante, but of course. Even a little Virgil and Descartes along the way. But this hypersonic chronicle about the novelist Ken Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and his Merry Pranksters motoring around California in a school bus decked out in Day-Glo psychedelic paint riding the ineffable wave of 1960s excess? That was something entirely new.

You’ll know one of Kesey’s slogans, which entered the language thanks to Wolfe: “You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.” I was decidedly on the Tom Wolfe bus.

Next up was “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a collection of essays published a decade before “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Who knew that anyone could write with such serve, with SO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!? When you’re 16 and have been battened on “The Scarlet Letter” and Kipling’s “If,” it is both a revelation and an emancipation.