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.

Reckonings
By Thomas Farber
Mānoa Books, 2025
Reviewed by Lee Rinehart, February 2026

            What is the value of a life? Let's get specific – the value of a human life. After living a human life for seventy-seven years Thomas Farber, author of over thirty works ranging from fiction to screenplay, had an insight. The kind of insight that comes from merely paying attention, and from, I would offer, living that life in possession of some kind of empathy. How could he not, after all? He is a writer, and to write well means having at least some interest, some predilection toward other humans. This is important to mention, because, as we shall see, not everyone does.

            The insight, he recalls in the opening lines of Reckonings, happened while watching humans at a local café.
…“outta the blue” as they say, it dawned on me that everyone I could see—older guy with upscale cowboy boots writing a novel; very senior citizen again saying she'd just turned ninety-three; barista José affectionately calling me pinche Pelon; woman reading Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine—these regulars, not to mention the panhandlers, university students, parents with children heading past the homeless / unhoused to the bakery collective…just like that it dawned on me: all sentenced to death. Mortal, that is to say.

            I imagine Farber sitting at a small circular table imagining their lives, in all their fullness and dullness, self-absorbed interiority and heroic generosity, passing him on this day of days when the insight lands, when he was ready, maybe.

            No one chooses to be born, and no one can help being what they are.

            Farber's Reckonings is written like the resonance of thought after you sit with it awhile, told in story-fashion as if you were sitting together, discussing the meaning of life and other well-worn yet unproductive paths. His reflections on human nature augmented by characters in his life; parents, writers, actors. People who manifest, I believe, the care and thoughtfulness in using the years they were given on this planet to do something meaningful. Which brings up Farber's antithesis.

Donald J. Trump, sixth month of his second time around as president of our oligarchy-autocracy-democracy hybrid. Status report: DJT's stern—abusive?—father Fred (1905–1999). Young Donald a bully, mean to other children? In need of being “shaped up,” sent off to military academy at age thirteen. Paternal bequest? Wealth, deceitfulness, racism, payoffs to the mob. And, as mentor-exemplar, vicious Roy Cohn (1927–1986). Always attack. Distract, deflect, delay. Hence (?) grownup Donald for decades stiffing, self-promoting, sullying. Swindling.

            Good choice. It's easy to think highly of humanity when the person being observed is manifestly amiable. It's another thing altogether when the subject is “another incarnation of that all-American archetype, salesman who sells ‘himself' to himself.” When humility is excised, especially in a national leader, all that is left is debilitating hubris.
            Farber's language and tone are not only appealing to the ear, but also to one's sense of humor. In what I can only describe as anti-hyperbolic synecdoche (anti-, because the resume he builds from DJT's antics would seem an exaggeration were they describing just about anyone else), Farber eviscerates number forty-seven's (easy to do; just report the facts) “autoeroticism of power,” the end result of his moral blindness, his denial of death, and so, his denial of the human.

            And this, I think, is Farber's point.

            DJT (I use the initials, as does Farber, because I cannot easily bring myself to write his name) didn't choose who he was, nor can he help being what he is, but he can help how he deals with other humans. No one can help being what they are. “People just can't help themselves. Of course you're still free, being who you are, to choose what to affirm or oppose in others.” So, it seems to Farber that this second insight is no excuse for being an asshole.

            Farber contrasts the banality of a sadly one-sided human archetype with real, normal people. Again, the writer's job, acceptance with humility, reminding us of who we are in the face of facile authoritarianism.

Despite having worked steadily at giving so many books away, still more than a thousand in my garage library. On the shelves, the life's work of so many gifted writers. How lucky I am to have had such teachers, compatriots, companions!

            This is what expands the human heart and mind. It is something that is foreign to people like DJT who have traded the joy of humanity for an obsession. In his denial of death, of the only thing in life he cannot prevent, he is addicted to naming buildings after himself. In this, he “pre-embalms himself for posthumous fame.”

            Farber's book calls for a reckoning, to be sure. A calling to account of the powerful who do not act, govern, or serve the people. But, I wonder, maybe it is more than that. Maybe this book is a calling to account of Farber's own, and by extension ours as well, response to the prospect of the demise of the powerful:

But if he was all alone in the ocean, and if he was crying out for help, arms flailing, going down a second time…yours truly standing on the beach beholding something so insanely improbable…though loathsome, he'd still be…a human being. In the moment, such a person going under right before my eyes, would I try to save him? Well: for sure I'd need time to weigh the options.

            DJT's hypothetical demise? Coming to terms with his own boundaries? What would I do? The very choice could make us question our own humanity.