American Canto

De: Olivia Nuzzi

Narrado por: Olivia Nuzzi

A mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade as Donald Trump has risen to dominance—from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole.

Olivia Nuzzi spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014, when the political landscape began to recon­figure itself around a singular personality whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next ten years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials, and government in blockbuster feature stories that drove the national conversation and propelled her to the heights of her profession.

Then, in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Nuzzi her job and reputation. Amid a full-blown tabloid frenzy, Nuzzi went quiet, drove west, and spent the next year in self-imposed exile at the edge of the country, where she wrote this searing and astonishingly clear-eyed account of what she—and we—have experienced over the last decade.

Nuzzi walked through hell and she took notes. The result is a brilliant and bracing reckoning with recent history from one of our sharpest political observers. Beginning in the present in California, and then turning her gaze back east and back in time, she crafts a dazzling mosaic of the Trump era: her many behind-the-scenes encounters with Trump himself, from their first meeting in Trump Tower to a wealth of revelatory conversations about his Hollywood aspirations, his dreams, his fears about being assassinated, and more; the life she led uneasily that skidded to a halt; the rise of digital surveillance and the decline of privacy; the normalization of political violence; and the collision of polarization with the democratization of information to sow doubt about every aspect of our reality.

American Canto is also a powerful personal history. Nuzzi’s account of growing up in working-class New Jersey as the child of alcoholics in the shadow of New York City and 9/11 is raw and moving. Her mother was angry, beautiful, and unpredictable. Her father, a loving man who supported his family as a sanitation worker, removed debris from Ground Zero. They both died young. A version of Nuzzi did, too. She approached this “kind of death” with the critical distance of a reporter. When interrogating her own mistakes, Nuzzi confesses, “I had trained my whole life in the battlefield of crisis.”

Despite her profession, Olivia Nuzzi has never been interested in breaking news. American Canto is not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president. Instead, it is something more artful and more interest­ing—a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time. It seeks to reframe our under­standing of the history we are living through from the perspective of someone who observed it from within the kaleidoscope and now sees it clearly from the other side.

Arrogant and cluttered

I found the story teller to be impossibly arrogant. She is the ultimate insider, knowing "the politician," the "not-yet-assassinated" and so many others whom educated and informed individuals like myself must figure out. I entangled most, but not all. her thinking was also convoluted and rambling with musings I did not find necessary or informative except to perhaps indicate an unclear state of mind.
The narration was very soft and choppy to begin with. It improved at some point but remained choppy throughout.
The story of lies and deception and cruelty that describes Washington/national politics, was informative and disturbing and rings very true.

The reading voice is unbearable!

I was so surprised to hear this voice and style of reading that I was not sure if it was a joke. It’s almost like Captain Kirk from the enterprise is trying to be a sexy female. It’s honestly awful

Difficult narration distracts from book content

The narration on this book is utterly impossible to listen to. I want to be able to take in the text, but the performance is so challenging to listen to, I could not. I might encourage audible to record a new reader so we can listen to this book with a trained performer.

Is this important ?

To me, the most interesting part of this book about a woman consumed by the fact everyone is talking about her is the fact thatI, until purchasing this audiobook, I had never heard of her at all.

That, perhaps, the missing piece in an otherwise very good, if at times poetically tedious, book.

Terrible narration

Narration is monotone, slow and unlistenable. Could not finish because of poor performance. Even AI narration is preferable.