Hailey Barrus

October 13, 2020

Non-fiction Text Review

“Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History”

The book Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History is about a reporter’s journey covering the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. Katy Tur, a broadcast journalist for NBC and anchor for MSNBC followed Trump during his 2016 campaign to become President of the United States. 

The book is from the point of view of Katy Tur herself, and each chapter flip flops between the day of the Election in November 2016 and the days leading up to Election Day 2016. The structure of the book allows readers to get a better understanding of Tur’s experience on the Trump campaign trail as well as how it led to Donald J. Trump securing the Republican Nomination and later becoming the 45th president of the United States of America. 

Some background information on the author, Katy Tur, is an American author and broadcast journalist, who is currently working as a correspondent for NBC news, and is an anchor on MSNBC. Tur grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and is the daughter of reporter/photography duo Zoey (Bob) Tur and Marika Gerrard. These two started the Los Angeles News Service back in the 1980s. With that being said, Katy was brought up around reporting breaking news, so it made sense when she decided to pursue a career in journalism. Since starting her career Tur has worked for a few different major news organizations since entering the profession and also was the recipient of a 2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. 

After releasing this book several notable newspapers and critics commenced on her work, the Washington Post described it as “A must-ride roller coaster of a memoir…A reminder that it really did happen that way, we aren’t all crazy, it was that crazy.” The New York Times writer, Jill Abramson described the book as compelling and it couldn’t be more timely. 

Throughout the book, the reader is made aware of how now President Trump treated Katy Tur, and right from the get go it seemed to be a hostile relationship between the two. Tur would press Trump with questions regarding hot topics for Presidential candidates such as the Muslim ban, boarder regulations, climate change, and foreign policies. Tur did an excellent job documenting the facts and what happened to make the book less biased but at the same time added her own personal twist in certain parts that made it more relatable. 

I believe the reason Tur decided to write this book was because her experience covering the campaign trail was in fact unbelievable, from being publicly attacked on national news by Donald J. Trump, to getting death threats, seemed like a very exciting and mentally draining part of her life. The purpose of publishing this is to allow other people to see first hand how draining it is to be a reporter covering a national candidate for president of the United States, let alone following a wealthy businessman turned reality TV star through his journey trying to make it to the Oval Office. From the beginning of her assignment Katy Tur believed the coverage would last just about 4 weeks, but slowly Trump gained leverage and followers, surprising the nation he rose to grab the Republican nomination for president in 2016, which is something that has never happened before, and whether you believe or back Trump and his policies, the fact he made it this far and has the support he does is news, and I applaud Katy for reporting it so graciously. 

To best explain the book, it is a mix of the feelings and toll covering the campaign took on Katy and her relationships, but at the same time did a great job accurately covering events that happened while on the 2016 campaign trail. Like I mentioned earlier the book goes back and forth between Election day and then days leading up to the big day. Each chapter is filled with personal information and it is meant to connect the readers more with Miss Tur, but at the same time I did do some research on the specific events she covered for NBC and MSNBC and I assure you she described the events in a factual way and word for word quoted and cited her sources to make the book not only entertaining, but factual and as objective as one can be. 

In the author notes in the beginning of the book Tur talks about how she saved everything throughout her coverage of Trump, every note, every written quote, every tweet, went through hours of footage covering Trump’s rallies. 

To pull a direct quote from the Author Note Tur said, “To recreate what happened, I recovered photos, videos, text messages, emails, and social media- my own and other people’s. I also relied on thousands of pages of reporting- a stack of papers more than a foot high- compiled contemporaneously by my NBC colleagues and me about the Trump campaign.”

Overall, I very much enjoyed the book, it didn’t even feel like a non-fiction read. It was never boring, and from the get go I was engaged throughout the entire book.