By firing James Comey less than four years into his ten-year term as FBI director in May 2017, Donald Trump enabled him to write a memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, as a private citizen. While the book is a traditional autobiography, Comey aims to use these experiences to explain his principles for good leadership, thereby framing his memoir as a treatise of sorts.
A Higher Loyalty is at its strongest in its early sections where Comey is able to balance both of these intentions, as he deftly weaves together his early life and time in public service with the themes of his argument. His encounter with a gunman at a young age, being bullied at school and, in one of the most poignant sections, the loss of his newborn son Collin to sepsis, all weigh heavily upon Comey and the consequences of each defined the ways he would choose to act as a leader.
