The courts will decide, but here’s the scorecard to follow along at home.
A compendium of charges brought by grand juries and prosecutors against Donald Trump.
Four court cases, three prosecutors, 91 criminal charges, possible sentences totaling more than 700 years in prison: Trump has always dealt in superlatives, and those are the staggering numbers, well known to anyone who follows the news—though, as MSNBC host Velshi writes in his introduction, they are so many and so thoroughly laid out “that we risk becoming numb to their monumental importance.” There are the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and the cooking of corporate books to hide them, set in New York; those squirreled-away classified documents, bound for trial in Florida; the attempted coup on Jan. 6, which jurors in the District of Columbia will hear; and the tampering with the 2020 election in Georgia. Other suits are likely to follow, since Trump and various co-conspirators allegedly tried to overthrow the electors of Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and other states as well. As Velshi correctly notes, the charges against Trump and his alleged criminal colleagues are exquisitely detailed, ranging from macro level (“during an audio-recorded meeting with a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff, none of whom possessed a security clearance, TRUMP showed and described a [nuclear] ‘plan of attack’ that TRUMP said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official…[and] also said, ‘as president I could have declassified it’ ”) to the comparatively micro level, such as Trump’s insistence that Georgia voting official Ruby Freeman “was a professional vote scammer and a known political operative” or that “close to 5,000 dead people voted” in Georgia. The text features the thickest of legalese, but it’s well worth plowing through as a preview of coming attractions.
The courts will decide, but here’s the scorecard to follow along at home.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780063382589
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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