... the authors illustrate key aspects of Trump’s threat to democracy.

Some of these landmarks are familiar...But other meaningful moments highlighted here have the quality of discovery.

... hurtles through the past two years of dizzying news.

... a more virtuous bowl of schadenfreude than Michael Wolff’s racier Landslide, published earlier this year. Call it cornflakes to Wolff’s Cap’n Crunch. In either case, it’s not good for me, but it’s so hard to pass up.

One thing is certain: against this carnage-filled backdrop Bob Woodward’s latest book is aptly titled indeed.

Woodward and Costa treat the early days of the Biden presidency with kid gloves, and you can feel why: nobody in America’s political establishment wants anything else broken. Understandable, but this does not make for incisive reporting. So a man who may well be too old for the job, whose decisions on Afghanistan are open to all manner of questions, is portrayed with gentleness bordering on reverence.

Peril has been written in haste and it shows. It is episodic, zigzagging back and forth across 72 chapters in an attempt to cover the first stretch of the Biden presidency as well as Trump’s final months in power. The urgent, staccato prose is effective but far from elegant. As in all the recent Trump books, Woodward and Costa’s account reveals the extent to which the former president was indulged by Republican politicians and aides who knew the election wasn’t stolen, but have enabled him to bamboozle his base and rewrite the history of the Capitol riot. It is not an original take, but important to know anyway.

... harrowing if familiar.

... tedious, spending more time stacking up anecdotes like bricks than generating new insights into a presidency that has already received exhaustive coverage. Reading Peril is as much of an endurance test as the reporting behind it must have been.

In decades to come, what political and media junkies may most recall about Peril — aside from its disturbing details about Trump — is that it defines Costa as Woodward’s successor.

Woodward and Costa give us interesting and significant information on the individuals who have shaped US politics.

What hasn’t been touched on much in the early media coverage of this book is that it spends a fair amount of pages on Joe Biden, his campaign, and his actions after the election, a welcome, if sometimes bland, counterpoint to the postelection frenzy.