President Trump’s daughter and senior White House advisor Ivanka Trump recently released a book titles “Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules of Success,” in which she quote’s Toni Morrison’s novel about slavery: “Are you a slave to your time or the master of it?”
NPR’s Annalisa Quinn notes that the book is “a long simper of a book, full of advice so anodyne (‘I believe that we each get one life and it’s up to us to live it to the fullest’), you could almost scramble the sentences and come out with something just as coherent.”
However, the book is unimpressive and misuses much of its source material.
“Trump’s lack of awareness, plus a habit of skimming from her sources, often results in spectacularly misapplied quotations — like one from Toni Morrison’s Beloved about the brutal psychological scars of slavery,” wrote Quinn.
Trump used the quote, “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
Quinn said it appears, “in cute faux-handwritten capitals” at the beginning of a chapter on “working smarter.”
“Are you a slave to your time or the master of it?” Trump breezily asked. “Despite your best intentions, it’s easy to be reactive and get caught up in returning calls, attending meetings, answering e-mails …”