A smart, big-picture takedown of the legal bulwarks of white supremacism and its privileges.
A cheerfully profane assault on laws that, by constitutional scholar and commentator Mystal’s account, need to be shredded.
“We live in a dystopian fucking future where Amazon knows that I need to buy new underwear before I do, but we’re supposed to pretend that it is difficult for the U.S. government to know if I’m eligible to vote?” So asks Mystal, opposing voter ID and other registration laws: Anything else, he insists, is an untoward effort on the part of the white majority-cum-minority to restrict voting rights on the part of anyone who’s not them. Just so, he insists, immigration laws are overblown, assuming that immigrants are “as violent and depraved as Trump,” though he harbors little hope of change: Whites will declare citizen Latinos to be white enough to help them close the border, and Latinos “will reward them by voting Republican” and repressing Latinos on the other side of the fence. Some of Mystal’s examples wander into areas few readers will likely have thought about. His analysis of airline deregulation is richly detailed, but in the end it comes to a full-throated denunciation of a market system in which there are very few winners (and those who “vote with your wallet,” he notes, need wallets thick enough to make their targets pay attention). Mystal mounts persuasive arguments against such things as laws that remove discretionary power from judges, school choice that allows conservative parents to dictate curricula that accommodates “their bigoted, unscientific, private predilections,” and much else that is fundamentally antidemocratic. He concludes with the provocative—and promising—suggestion that apportionment of congressional seats be for every 580,000 persons, meaning Wyoming gets its representative but California gets a dozen more, which “would go a long way toward restoring basic representative democracy in this country.”
A smart, big-picture takedown of the legal bulwarks of white supremacism and its privileges.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781620978580
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.
A New Jersey senator’s moral manifesto.
Booker situates his narrative in the wake of his 2025 record-breaking 25-hour stand on the Senate floor, an act of physical endurance and moral insistence that serves as its animating example. Though not framed as memoir, the episode implicitly positions Booker himself as a model of the virtues he argues are essential to democratic life. Organized around 10 qualities, including agency, vulnerability, truth, perseverance, and grace, the book advances a clear thesis. “In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail.” Booker illustrates this claim through figures such as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose willingness to endure sacrifice for principle anchors the book’s moral lineage, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose composure under public scrutiny is presented as an example of dignity as civic strength. These portraits reinforce Booker’s belief that character, sustained over time, can shape public life, even when political outcomes remain uncertain or incomplete. He supplements these examples with personal stories drawn from family, faith, and community, delivered with emotional conviction and a tone that remains affirming and carefully calibrated. Much of the narrative reads like an expansive commencement address, earnest and reassuring, offering moral affirmation at moments when readers might reasonably expect sharper confrontation. That rhetorical choice ultimately defines the book’s limits. Booker acknowledges political conflict and compromise, but rarely examines them in depth, and while urging leaders to take moral risks, he avoids sustained reflection on how some of his own political decisions have tested the virtues he promotes. The result is a principled but self-conscious work that affirms shared values while offering little guidance for navigating power and accountability.
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250436733
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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
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