User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President

The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire is a 2000 biographical book written by Gwenda Blair, a an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, about three generations of the Trump family, starting with Friedrich Trumpf (1869 - 1918) who immigrated to the United States in 1885 from Kingdom of Bavaria (now in Germany), then Fred Trump (1905 - 1999), and finally Donald Trump (b. 1946 -). It was first published by Simon & Schuster in 2000 and reprinted in 2015 with a new title, The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President and a new preface.

About the author
Blair, who is an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, published her first biography, Laura Ingalls Wilder, as part of a Beginning Biographies Series for children. In her second biography, Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch And The Selling of TV News, which was published in 1988, portrayed Savitch as an "archetype of ambition and vulnerability" and catalogued Savitches' "human flaws". Janet Maslin described Almost Golden as a "haunting book about the driven television reporter Jessica Savitch" in which Blair wrote "about raging ambition...in a way that made readers complicit in Ms. Savitch's relentlessness."

The Trumps was her third biography. When she began her research for The Trumps, Blair had intended to write a book about Donald Trump, but as she researched his father and grandfather, it became a "history of American entrepreneurship."

According to her faculty page at Columbia University, Blair has written for Politico, The New York Times, Newsweek, the New York Daily News, Esquire, The Village Voice, Chicago Magazine, and other newspapers and magazines.

In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Blair described how Trump's "voice, language, confidence" helped him win the election. Blair said his voice had a "hint of menace beneath the surface", and an "unpolished immediacy". His "dark stew of conversational snippets and memory scraps, random phrases and half-thoughts "random phrases" reminds people of the "voice inside their own heads."

Publisher's summary
The publisher's summary described the the generational story of the Trump family as one that parallels the history of the United States starting with immigrants who made small fortunes during the Klondike Gold Rush. In the second generation, in the 1940s and 1950s, Fred Trump made his fortune in housing developments through the New Deal, "using government subsidies and loopholes". The next generation, which included Fred Jr., Maryanne, and President Donald Trump conintued to benefit from the family fortune.

Reviews
In his 2000 book review of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire in The New York Times, David Margolick described Blair's "efforts to show some kind of genetic link between the generations" as "labored" with readers "struggling through the long sections on grandfather Friedrich and father Fred" to get to what really intrigued them, Donald Trump, who Blair had described as "the most famous man in America, if not the world" in 1989. Margolick described her section on Friedrich Trumpf as padded and "heavy-handed foreshadowing". He wrote that her section on Fred Trump, while too lengthy and rambling, "pick[ed] up speed and gravity". He said that in her section on Donald Trump, she "neatly captures [his] uncanny business instincts, as well as his competitiveness, chutzpah, cruelty, vulgarity and hucksterism. And she catches him in his lies, or what Trump himself calls truthful hyperbole. Margolick wrote that Blair's book is "conscientious", "prodigiously" researched, written "with authority", and with "cogent" "descriptions of intricate deals"." She "unmasks Trump" but is neither as "caustic" or gloating as she could have been. He concludes that Blair depicted the Trump that everyone already knew: "Donald Trump is like one of his typical buildings: lots of glitter on the outside but nothing profound below."

In her Times review of the 2000 publication, Janet Maslin described Blair's book The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire as a "no-win proposition" even though it is an "exhaustive", and "copiously researched study". Maslin wrote that the section on the first generation was "cobbled together" with "dubious" claims as most of it was "undocumented". She said that Blair was on "more solid ground with the story of how Fred Trump carved out a real estate empire in Brooklyn". While Blair's portrait of Donald Trump is that of a "germ-phobic anti-Gatsby," Maslin concludes that Trump remained in "full control of his own image and reputation, impregnable to the kinds of details that emerge [in Blair's book]."

In his 2000 The New York Review of Books entitled "Golden Boy", James Traub questioned why bother revisiting Trump in 2000, when he is "an almost sickeningly familiar figure to much of the reading public". Traub said that "Donald Trump is the price you pay for living in a marketplace culture". He wrote that Blair's strategy of turning "Trump’s life into the final stage of a multigenerational saga" made sense in New York, where "real estate has been a family business...since the time of the Astors and the Goelets in the late eighteenth century".

The publisher's summary cited positive reviews from The New York Observer's Robert Gottlieb, The Philadelphia Enquirer 's Steve Weinberg, The San Diego Union-Tribune 's Cintra Wilson, and Kirkus Reviews. The latter compared Blair's reconstruction to "the best work of David Halberstam and Robert Caro."

Alleged errors
In a film released in 2014 entitled Kings of Kallstadt by filmmaker Simone Wendel, Trump admitted that his grandfather Friedrich Trumpf, came from the small village of Kallstadt, in southwest Germany. The village, which is now the home to 1200 people, has been home to Trumps for hundreds of years. The film featured the home of Trump's grandfather which is still in very good condition.

According to Blair's research, "Hanns Drumpf, an itinerant lawyer, moved to Kallstadt in 1608, and the spelling of his last name changed by the end of that century" to Trump. This has been challenged. According to a 2015 article in Die Welt, a German national daily newspaper, Friedrich Trumpf "has always been called Trump, never Drumpf, even if this misinformation persists stubbornly".

In a Last Week Tonight with John Oliver television episode aired on February 28, 2016, John Oliver urged viewers to "Make Donald Drumpf Again," referring to Blair's book. The segment attracted 85 million views on social media, and was the most popular segment the show has ever had.

Donald Trump: Master Apprentice
In 2005, The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire was adapted and re-released as Donald Trump: Master Apprentice.

Trump Unauthorized
American Broadcasting Company (ABC)'s 2005 two-hour biography television film, Trump Unauthorized, chronicling 25 years of Donald Trump's personal and business life, was based on The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire and Donald Trump: Master Apprentice.