Publishers Weekly
10/30/2023
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.)
From the Publisher
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
“Revealing...Romney: A Reckoning is in many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions...throughout Coppins’s narrative Trump, the supposed billionaire, morphs from comic relief into devouring nemesis....While should-have-known-better Republican colleagues waffled...Romney kept his head above the fetid waters.”
—Tom Mallon, New York Times
“A scoop-rich biography...An especially clear window onto the forces that over the last decade have transformed the GOP....Coppins gained extraordinary access...The tell-all tales gush forth.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Rare access...a reminder that meritocratic success in business is not easily translatable into democratic politics. What lessons should one draw from a wealthy, talented and decent man who attempts to lead a political party in the throes of a populist revolt? Above all, take care not to sacrifice one’s family, faith, and integrity.”
—Wall Street Journal
“An astonishing, nearly unprecedented catalog of intraparty critique... it’s also, and maybe all the more importantly, a deft study of the capacity for rationalization...this is what makes this book so interesting, and also important.”
—Politico
“A rare feat in modern-day political reporting: an account in which the subject engages in actual introspection.”
—New Yorker
“The soon-to-be ex-senator shared a vast trove with biographer McKay Coppins for this book [which] has already scored in the marketplace of tittle-tattle, yielding several items worthy of Page Six, if not Page One. Coppins adds considerable value.”
—Washington Post
“A complex book about a complex man, one that provides an unusually revelatory look at a prominent political figure’s private views and inner conflicts.”
—Boston Globe
“[A] probing biography...a penetrating analysis of the ongoing Republican civil war through the eyes of one of its last embattled centrists.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A memorable distillation of a life in politics, of the tension between high principle and unseemly justification. It’s a tension Romney has navigated better than most, in part for his willingness to acknowledge its existence.”
—Carlos Lozada, New York Times
“A memorable distillation of a life in politics, of the tension between high principle and unseemly justification. It’s a tension Romney has navigated better than most, in part for his willingness to acknowledge its existence.”
—Carlos Lozada, New York Times
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-20
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.
