Recent BooksMarch/April 2020 173not take his oath o o¾ce sincerely.
The authors dread a collapse o norms
and the transformation o laws into
“paper tigers.”The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native
America From 1890 to the Present
BY DAVID TREUER. Riverhead Books,
2019, 528 pp.Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee, still in print hal a century after
its original publication, presented the
story o¤ Native Americans as one o
tragic decline. Treuer’s counternarra-
tive is destined to last at least as long
as Brown’s classic. Its story o resilience
and cultural, economic, and political
renaissance among native communities
will be revelatory for most readers who
are not Native American. Treuer, who
grew up on an Ojibwe reservation in
Minnesota, combines interviews,
personal memoir, history, and litera-
ture to vividly trace the last 40 years
o¤ Native American history, including
many positive developments. There is
plenty o tragedy in the story o
Native Americans’ relationship with
the U.S. government, most o which
stems from Washington’s various
eorts to subdue or wipe out the
tribes. But there are also glimmers o
hope. For example, U.S. military
service has provided a positive sense o
belonging for many Native Americans,
even though their heroism has often
gone unrecognized. Continuing legal
battles have righted some past wrongs.
Treuer interweaves his analysis with
intimate tales o “becoming Indian” in a
context in which that identity can
bring empowerment and personal success
rather than victimization.inspiring, infuriating, and, as a chroni-
cle o U.S. involvement in the region,
deeply sad.
Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s
War on the World’s Most Powerful O§ce
BY SUSAN HENNESSEY AND
BENJAMIN WITTES. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2020, 432 pp.
Hennessey and Wittes track the
evolution o the powers o the U.S.
presidency and how President Donald
Trump has used, abused, and changed
those powers. Their understated
description o Trump as conducting an
“expressive presidency” doesn’t begin
to do justice to the extent o his
wrongdoing: his propensity to lie, his
routinely unethical behavior, his
devotion to the use o law enforcement
as “an instrument o power against
enemies,” and, tellingly, his refusal to
endure scrutiny o his own conduct.
Unfortunately, the authors’ discussion
o the Nixon and Clinton impeach-
ment processes and o the Mueller
report does not compensate for the fact
that the book was completed before
Trump’s impeachment in December
- Still, the authors deliver a
chilling analysis o the damage that has
been done to the o¾ce o the presi-
dent. Even i Congress can rouse itsel
to reinforce the separation o powers,
the record o the past few years reveals
that those powers o the presidency
over which Congress has little or no
jurisdiction—including the president’s
independence in foreign policy and
law enforcement, his power o the
pardon, and his capacity to mislead the
public—are immensely inuential
when abused by a president who does