The book includes substantive and brilliant chapters on the major challenges facing the country: racial strife, the dominance of tech companies, drug cartels, predatory crime, religious pluralism in public schools. In the end, though, the narrative comes back to the subject of Donald Trump. Is he capable of taking on these challenges? His 'political persona,' writes Mr. Barr on the book’s final page, 'is too negative for the task ahead.' He’s right..

Barr's memoir spans seven decades but is inevitably dominated by his two years as attorney general under former President Donald Trump. His account of those years will be read hungrily by Trump's fiercest defenders and harshest detractors. It is unlikely to satisfy either.

It’s a rare Washington memoir that makes you gasp in the very second sentence.

Barr can tell a good yarn and has a penchant for deadpan punchlines.

Barr takes care in this book to present his childhood as more hardscrabble than a rarefied prep school education and an apartment on New York City’s Riverside Drive would have anyone believe.