As much as you think you know about the arrogance, vanity and sheer incompetence of Trump’s years in the White House, Bolton’s account will still astonish you.

Known as a fastidious note taker, Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies.

... a White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and negative report on the Trump Administration.

The president portrayed here is not only self-involved but single-minded about pursuing and preserving his own starkly personal interests.

Very few books, and certainly not a 500-page memoir about national-security policy making, could measure up to the media event that is its publication. Even so, The Room Where It Happened is a competent piece of writing. Readers looking mainly for stories about Donald Trump’s unorthodox behavior may find it tough to get through the author’s detailed discussions of U.S. policy on Venezuela and the inner workings of America’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, but Mr. Bolton moves the story along quickly enough.

Its portrayal of Trump is certainly unflattering, a damning portrait of a man totally out of his depth in the White House and unable to separate his personal interests from national ones. But the book may be equally damning in what it displays about Bolton’s worldview.

Former national security advisor Bolton...harps on his foreign policy pet peeves...critiques former colleagues (Jim Mattis, Nikki Haley), and defends his decision not to testify in the House impeachment inquiry in this lacerating yet tiresome slog through his time in the Trump administration.

... the most damning written account by a Trump administration alumnus, the one that stands to haunt the president come November.

Mr. Bolton’s book is 'must' reading for observers of Mr. Trump's execution of America's foreign policy and his general approach to government in the run-up to 2020's presidential elections.

Granted that Bolton’s account is self-serving and fragmentary, his memoir is valuable. Bolton shows the reader how one highly intelligent and experienced adviser to the president viewed hot spots around the globe—from China, Russia, and Iran to Venezuela. His description of debates within the administration gives clues as to how other officials saw these critical areas. In these respects, Bolton’s book performs a service for concerned citizens and policy analysts parallel to that of No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington by Condoleezza Rice.

... almost five hundred pages of bumptious recitation, fatuous braggadocio, and lame attempts at wit.

If you’ve been paying attention, there aren’t a lot of surprises in former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s book, at least as far as headline stories go.

Bolton is not a graceful writer, but he’s a clear, competent one and, occasionally, a witty one. Of course, the telling is slanted toward what Bolton thinks should have happened, and oh the pity it didn’t. No sin in that. Such defines the genre.