Necessary reading for civil libertarians, public defenders, and activists.
The veteran legal affairs expert offers a powerful attack on a judiciary committed to advancing the police state.
There was little in the way of formal policing in this country until the later 19th century, writes Chemerinsky, who has authored multiple notable books on systemic legal problems in the U.S. Before that, municipalities relied on night watchmen who might occasionally arrest a presumed wrongdoer, a system that “was cheap to administer.” An important consideration is that these police were not subject to the guarantees of the Bill of Rights and later amendments. Instead, the supposition all the way up to the level of the Supreme Court was that only the federal government was bound to honor unreasonable search rules and the like. “For a very brief time in the 1960s,” he writes, “the Warren Court expanded…constitutional rights and sought to significantly limit certain types of police misconduct. But overall the Warren Court was an aberration in American history.” Instead, the court has taken steps to make police immune from being sued for damages, a matter now being tested in the George Floyd case. However, Chemerinsky observes, the very restraints that were used on Floyd were approved by a court ruling in 1983, such that “federal courts cannot hear cases that challenge the chokehold and seek to stop it from being used.” (The logic behind the court’s ruling, writes the author, is particularly contorted.) Even equal protection rules are overlooked while it is statistically inarguable that most police violence is directed toward minorities. “In 2016,” to name just one year, “Black males between fifteen and thirty-four were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers.” Chemerinsky does not join the call to defund law enforcement agencies; he argues the police would merely be privatized to serve the rich. Instead, he suggests that because the Supreme Court will not restrain the police, “state courts can and should invoke state constitutions in order to do so.”
Necessary reading for civil libertarians, public defenders, and activists.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-651-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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