Critical Praise

Framed by two insights—no one chooses to be born and no one can help being what they are—and punctuated by visual images of apocalypse and final judgment, Thomas Farber reckons with the calamitous figure of Donald Trump, democracy in crisis, aging and mortality (his own and Trump’s), his career, the role of the writer, and the fate of books. Reflecting on endings with his distinctive curiosity and honesty, Farber has produced an incisive, witty, satiric, and also compassionate book. Reckonings is the latest in a series of remarkable creative memoirs he's written over the past decade, coming to terms with life and its limits.
Samuel Otter, author of Melville’s Anatomies

Sharp, keen-sighted meditations on fate, mortality, and the hellscape of the Trump presidency. Sumptuous and nightmarish, leavened with humor. Richly illustrated with the fantastical art of Hieronymus Bosch and other artists, creating a literary kaleidoscope fitting for our disturbed and disturbing era.
Lillian Howan, author of The Charm Buyers

Funny, perceptive, swinging, bone clean. To fillet #47’s America and still come up with compassion for the condition of the human condition is a brave undertaking; not for the faint of heart.
-Ben Sidran, author of There Was A Fire

Canonical images of the imagined terrors of the afterlife find perfect accompaniment in Thomas Farber’s witty and searing reflections on sin, mortality, and the corporeal truth of even the most omnipresent–seemingly inescapable–among us."
Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Water Ghosts and Green Island

Is hell quotidian? Or is it bizarre? Both, say the wonder-struck and matter-of-fact illustrations in Tom Farber’s Reckonings—a note that Farber’s quick, lucid prose keeps up, in a book for our times.
Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet

Opinionator-in-Chief, Demonizer-in-Chief: Reckonings provides pejorative titles for DJT, then notes an exhaustive list is hard to come by, which is fine with the writer. Contempt's not the only fish he’s after. What interests him is awareness of his own mortality juxtaposed against DJT’s apparent lack of it. “Having fought so long for at­tention and dominance, can he [DJT] grasp the dazzling equality—democracy!— of all humans in death?” In pithy paragraphs, the author suggests how DJT may approach that apotheosis. Though ‘just weighing the options,’ the writer’s reckoning of his own mortality overshadows any future the Self-Deifier-in-Chief can imagine for himself. A wise and shrewd weighing, an illuminating read.
Ben Schwartz, author of The Way It Went and Everything There Was To Tell

RECKONINGS: Charles Rammelkamp Considers a Collection of Witheringly Satirical Essays By Thomas Farber

Illustrated with almost two dozen horrific images by such artists as William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch – the circa 1413 painting by Lieven van den Clite, The Last Judgment, is a particularly eye-popping depiction of a hellscape – Thomas Farber’s withering satirical assessment of Donald J. Trump and the MAGA movement in this collection of essays (‘petulant, querulous. Mercurial, impulsive. Winging it. Deni­grating, disparaging. Vengeful.’) is heartfelt and accurate. From his analysis of Trump’s Obama Derangement Syndrome – ‘DJT’s fear of feeling inferior. Of being inferior. Unable to acknowledge his betters. Obama: not perfect, but a Black guy in America with academic achievement, verbal wit, grace. Slim, trim. Family man. Writes his own books.’ – to his assessment of the first months of Trump’s second term – ‘Whirlwind; shit-storm. DJT centerstage, saturating the media, all-seen. Conflict, disorder, slop. Countless “emergency” executive orders and directives. Caprice, whim. Dismantling institutions, norms. Experts purged, media sued, universities intimidated, courts treated with contempt. Climate of fear…’ – Farber skewers the “Bullshitter-in-chief” with razor-sharp wit.

Indeed, citing the great satirist Jonathan Swift numerous times, Farber telegraphs exactly what he is up to here: his contempt floweth over! In essay after essay he describes Trump’s gluttony, depravity, self-love, resentment, martyrdom (always the victim. How many times have we heard him bleat the words “witch hunt”?). When he didn’t get the Nobel Prize, Trump whined, “I’m just saying that there’s a lot of unfairness in this world.”

Farber cites a wealth of literary precedents to pinpoint Trump, including Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch in which a dictator is promoted to “general of the universe” to give him a rank higher than death. Think of Trump’s mania for naming things after himself. Isn’t it wearying? Is this some bid for immortality? Farber cites Joseph Conrad, Dante Alighieri, H.L. Mencken, Julian Barnes, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, even Seth Meyers’ comment at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner about Trump running for president: ‘I thought he was running as a joke.’ In more than one place Farber makes fun of Trump’s appearance: ‘show off comb-over, bronzer, foun­dation, concealer, hair dye, high-lift shoes…’

Farber also skewers Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy, the architect of the regime’s cruel deportation policy, Kelly Anne Conway and her “alternative facts,” the stooge press secretary Leavitt, Hawley, Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the ‘lickspittles Rubio, Bondi, Noem, Gabbard.’

But at 81, Thomas Farber is also concerned about death and legacy in general. He cites two great epiphanies he had entering his ninth decade: 1) No one chooses to be born, and 2) No one can help being what they are. While these “epiphanies” are also clichés, they zero in on these existential truths. Perhaps the author feels their truth more keenly as he ages. Reckonings, indeed, is ‘Being called to account after death.’

And so he writes, mocking Trump: ‘Manichean universe. Winners and losers (“gutless losers,” “total los­ers,” “stone cold losers”). Zero sum: winner takes all. But…what of a world without losers? Without winners? No DJT?’ And since every one of us is going to die, ‘I imagined posthumous glory-hound DJT lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Publicly decomposing, still star of the show as Fox News records him rotting 24/7….’ And since this is the grift-gluttonous MAGA we’re talking about, ‘Also get­ting richer from the sale of MAGA-treasured relics — teeth, implanted hair, toenails, skeleton. And the priceless genitals? Nothing like ’em since the Holy Prepuce, Christ’s elusive foreskin.’

Farber cites Mussolini’s fate – captured by partisans at the end of World War II, executed by gunshot, hung upside down in a public square. Is this Trump’s fate? And then there was Napoleon – defeated at Waterloo in 1815, exiled to the remote island of St. Helena. ‘Accompanied by members of his retinue, from whom he continued to require imperial etiquette, increasingly obese, Napoleon lived another six years under the control of British soldiers.’

Farber asks, ‘Did DJT never read poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)? Never had to memorize “Ozymandias” while at military academy? No intimation of oblivion, that second death?’ He cites Philip Larkin:

It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavor
To bring to bloom the million-petaled flower
Of being here.

The dazzling if grim artwork that accompanies Farber’s mini-essays cannot be over-emphasized. They complement and deepen the message of corruption and a sort of karmic punishment that awaits evildoers. Bosch’s paintings in Reckonings include The resurrection of the dead and doomed led into Hell, several panels from The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and The Last Judgement. All depict suffering souls, naked, bound, tortured, pierced with arrows, skeletal. The other paintings, by the Renaissance artists, Lieven van den Clite, Lucas Cranach the elder and Ian Mandijn, are similarly gruesome, not to mention the Blake watercolor, The Simoniac Pope, inspired by Canto XIX of The Inferno, depicting Pope Nicholas III being cast headfirst into a flaming pit, the soles of his feet on fire.

Thomas Farber’s Reckonings is both a brilliant satirical take on a would-be tyrant and a reminder that death awaits us all.