Provides valuable insights and vividly captures the human drama of criminal cases.
A prosecutor explores the criminal justice system, exploring its “humanlike qualities.”
As a veteran prosecutor in Riverside, Calif., Strunsky has long labored in the trenches of the law. He puts that experience to good use in his book, which is full of valuable insight into the system, much of it drawn from cases he has tried. Strunsky is not a typical, Law & Order prosecutor; he’s sensitive to the nuances of the system that are “rarely explored or recognized.” For Strunsky, a trial is not a cold, clinical exercise but a cauldron of feelings. “[H]uman emotion is incredibly influential in the courtroom,” he notes. His case narratives capture those emotions. For example, in the case of two sisters who recant their allegations of molestation on the witness stand, the author writes, “The question that still haunts me is, What if the two girls hadn’t come clean and confessed?” Strunsky approaches juries as a storyteller, and he brings the same compelling quality to his writing. During a murder trial, he sets the scene: A man who had just killed his wife in a hot tub, “stepped into his suede-like moccasin slippers...and stopped to stare down at [her] lifeless body, partially obscured by soap bubbles and the turbulence of the spa jets.” In another dramatic passage, Strunsky recalls how he made legal history by piercing the clergy-penitent privilege in the case of a Jehovah’s Witness accused of child molestation. The defendant had made admissions to a church elder. “We can’t allow this exemption to shield child molesters,” Strunsky argues. The author also takes on such hot-button subjects as capital punishment and handgun control. “Because someone had a small, easy-to-carry ‘high-speed bullet dispenser’ at his fingertips, a shouting match turned into an irreversible death,” he says of one murder case. Some readers might find some of the graphic detail in the book a bit raw. But Strunsky’s singular achievement is to free the criminal justice system from the distortions of Hollywood and show it as it really is.
Provides valuable insights and vividly captures the human drama of criminal cases.Pub Date: July 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1620958810
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Book Baby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.
That thing in the air that is deadlier than even your “strenuous flus”? Trump knew—and did nothing about it.
The big news from veteran reporter Woodward’s follow-up to Fear has been widely reported: Trump was fully aware at the beginning of 2020 that a pandemic loomed and chose to downplay it, causing an untold number of deaths and crippling the economy. His excuse that he didn’t want to cause a panic doesn’t fly given that he trades in fear and division. The underlying news, however, is that Trump participated in this book, unlike in the first, convinced by Lindsey Graham that Woodward would give him a fair shake. Seventeen interviews with the sitting president inform this book, as well as extensive digging that yields not so much news as confirmation: Trump has survived his ineptitude because the majority of Congressional Republicans go along with the madness because they “had made a political survival decision” to do so—and surrendered their party to him. The narrative often requires reading between the lines. Graham, though a byword for toadyism, often reins Trump in; Jared Kushner emerges as the real power in the West Wing, “highly competent but often shockingly misguided in his assessments”; Trump admires tyrants, longs for their unbridled power, resents the law and those who enforce it, and is quick to betray even his closest advisers; and, of course, Trump is beholden to Putin. Trump occasionally emerges as modestly self-aware, but throughout the narrative, he is in a rage. Though he participated, he said that he suspected this to be “a lousy book.” It’s not—though readers may wish Woodward had aired some of this information earlier, when more could have been done to stem the pandemic. When promoting Fear, the author was asked for his assessment of Trump. His reply: “Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis.” Multiple crises later, Woodward concludes, as many observers have, “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982131-73-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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