A revealing look at a campaign intended to stifle the First Amendment in favor of those in power.
A searching account of the modern right-wing push to silence criticism by suing for libel.
Wrote jurist Robert Bork in 1984, libel suits “may threaten the public and constitutional interest in free, and frequently rough, discussion.” That rough discussion, notes New York Times business investigative reporter Enrich, has lately included revelations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in unreported gifts and that Justice Samuel Alito’s home was flying “a flag associated with the January 6 uprising…just as he was poised to hear a high-stakes case about the attempted insurrection.” Knowing of both scandals, Enrich holds, is most definitely in the public interest—and precisely the sort of thing that Alito and Thomas’ fellow ideologues are trying to suppress through libel lawsuits that may or may not be mere nuisances but that would drain the resources of most small publications, dissuading investigation. Enrich reminds us that current libel laws require proof that a defending party had “actually malicious” intent, a requirement that dates only to a Supreme Court ruling in 1964; in Britain the standard of proof is much lower, which explains why so much “libel tourism” takes place there, even as New York Times v. Sullivan provided a bulwark protecting the press. As recently as 2010, Congress unanimously passed a law “celebrating the country’s commitment to defending Americans from weaponized libel claims.” But then came a “freshening stream,” as Bork put it, of claims funded by wealthy right-wing sponsors that, in one notable instance, crushed the anti-establishment Gawker website. That stream is quickening with the resurgence of Donald Trump, who has promised to alter libel laws “so when they [i.e., journalists] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
A revealing look at a campaign intended to stifle the First Amendment in favor of those in power.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780063372900
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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