Romney : a reckoning /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! In this illuminating and "scoop-rich biography...the tell-all tales rush forth" ( Los Angeles Times ) offering a "penetrating analysis of the ongoing Republican civil war through the eyes of one of its last embattled centrists" ( Publishers Weekly ).

Few figures in American politics have seen more and said less than Mitt Romney. An outspoken dissident in Donald Trump's GOP, he has made headlines in recent years for standing alone against the forces he believes are poisoning the party he once led. Romney was the first senator in history to vote to remove from office a president of his own party. When that president's supporters went on to storm the US Capitol, Romney delivered a thundering speech from the Senate floor accusing his fellow Republicans of stoking insurrection. Despite these moments of public courage, Romney has shared very little about what he's witnessed behind the scenes over his three decades in politics--in GOP cloakrooms and caucus lunches, in his private meetings with Donald Trump and his family, in his dealings with John McCain, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema. Now, Romney provides a window to his most private thoughts.

Based on dozens of interviews with Romney, his family, and his inner circle as well as hundreds of pages of his personal journals and private emails, this in-depth portrait by award-winning journalist McKay Coppins shows a public servant authentically wrestling with the choices he has made over his career. In lively, revelatory detail, the book traces Romney's early life and rise through the ranks of a fast-transforming Republican Party and exposes how a trail of seemingly small compromises by political leaders has led to a crisis in democracy. "A rare feat in modern-day political reporting" ( The New Yorker ), Romney: A Reckoning is a redemptive story about a complex politician who summoned his moral courage just as fear and divisiveness were overtaking American life.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue (1)
• Chapter 1 The Body Upstream (11)
• Chapter 2 "This Means Something" (21)
• Chapter 3 Hurry (33)
• Chapter 4 Emergencies and Catastrophes (49)
• Chapter 5 What It Took (63)
• Chapter 6 The Tar Pit (75)
• Chapter 7 HeiSt (95)
• Chapter 8 50.1 Percent (117)
• Chapter 9 Just the Beginning (155)
• Chapter 10 Vox (173)
• Chapter 11 Turning and Turning (191)
• Chapter 12 The Punch Bowl (207)
• Chapter 13 Conviction (231)
• Chapter 14 2020 (257)
• Chapter 15 The Cathedral and the Gargoyle (271)
• Chapter 16 New Friends (283)
• Chapter 17 "What We Used to Be" (297)
• Epilogue (319)
• Author's Note (325)
• Notes (329)
• Index (375)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney resists his party's sharp right turn in this probing biography. Atlantic journalist Coppins (The Wilderness) recaps Romney's success running Bain Capital's private equity fund, which was criticized for shuttering heartland factories and laying off workers; his term as a liberalish Republican governor of Massachusetts, where he instituted a universal health insurance system that became a model for Obamacare; his ill-fated 2012 presidential campaign, which floundered because of his image as a "cold-blooded, out-of-touch plutocrat"; his horror at Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP in 2016, which he denounced in a controversial speech; and his current Senate term, during which he bucked his party's rightward drift (he joined a Black Lives Matter protest march in 2020), cast the lone Republican vote to convict in Trump's first impeachment trial, and rejected Trump's 2020 election denialism--all at considerable cost to his political fortunes. (After the election, Coppins notes, Romney found himself on an airliner full of Trump supporters chanting "Traitor!") In Coppins's telling, Romney is a decent, dutiful man, eager to apply technocratic fixes to government. But he also makes Romney an apt symbol of a GOP establishment focused on staid business conservatism that was baffled and terrified by the erupting populist rage of its base. The result is a penetrating analysis of the ongoing Republican civil war through the eyes of one of its last embattled centrists. (Oct.)

Kirkus Book Review

A portrait of an old-school conservative politico who found new resolve as an anti-Trump Republican. Atlantic writer Coppins, author of The Wilderness, opens on January 2, 2021, as Romney tried to alert Mitch McConnell to reports that something bad was brewing around the Capitol. Four days later, Romney would be among the besieged politicians. Clearly, it's not company he relished: Coppins shows how the Utah senator holds most of his Republican colleagues in contempt. Romney considers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz the smartest people in the Senate, but in their support of overturning the election and abetting the rioters, he notes, "they were making a calculation…that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution." Coppins allows that he showed Romney a draft of the book with the understanding that his subject had no editorial control over it, and that the senator objected only that the author had "made too much of his transformation in the Trump years." Yet that transformation was both complete and multifaceted. When he ran for president in 2012, Romney solicited Trump's endorsement, which allowed Trump to boast, "I could have said, 'Mitt, drop to your knees,' [and] he would have dropped to his knees." From the moment Trump announced his candidacy, Romney knew that he was a danger to the republic. Though one report Coppins offers as fact has been the subject of vigorous objection--he writes that Oprah Winfrey offered to run an independent campaign with Romney in 2020, while Winfrey says she didn't offer herself as running mate but did in fact encourage Romney to run--the writing is solid, and the author provides a useful study of a man who, witnessing the disintegration of his party into demagoguery and lies, decided to stand for the truth. A vigorous, highly readable account of politics--and ethics--in action. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic where he covers politics, religion, and national affairs. He is the author of The Wilderness , a book about the battle for the future of the Republican Party, and he has been a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. He won the Aldo Beckman Award from the White House Correspondents Association for his coverage of the Trump presidency, and the Wilbur Award for religion journalism. He lives near Washington, DC, with his wife and children.