Donald Trump has battled many a journalist, but he has not yet faced as eloquent and coruscating an authority as Michiko Kakutani, the fearless book critic of The New York Times for three and a half decades, who left the paper last year to write The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. “One reason I wrote this book is to call attention to those who in their own times found what Margaret Atwood has called the ‘danger flags,’” she says, “in this case the denunciation of ‘fake news’ and the citing of ‘alternative facts’ by Trump and his White House.”

Kakutani, the daughter of a Yale University mathematician, analyzes with peerless acuity the threads in culture and politics that came together to create the perfect carnival tent for the Con Man from Queens. “Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.”

Fearsome as she is in print—Norman Mailer called her a “one-woman kamikaze,” while Jonathan Franzen crowned her “the stupidest person in New York City” after she panned his memoir, an epithet that did not deter her from giving his next book a rave—Michi, as her friends know her, is mild in manner in person and shy by habit, displaying not a shred of hauteur. Invocation of her byline has lent intellectual veneer to shows like Sex and the City and Girls. But her name has been far more recognizable than she is, given the scarcity of images existing of her.

Yet after reviewing thousands of books and winning a Pulitzer along the way, she did not find it difficult to write her own. “It was an evolution of what I did at the Times, where I tried to take part in the conversation of ideas, both in fiction and nonfiction. This was like running a marathon instead of doing a lot of sprints.”