An instructive, highly readable account of the law, its protectors, and its enemies.
The former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York dishes on the corrupt Trump administration.
“One of the things you learn as a prosecutor is that there are a surprising number of people in the world who enjoy talking like mobsters when they’re behind closed doors,” writes prosecutor Berman in a memoir whose every page touches still-fresh headlines. One of those people was Berman’s former boss Donald Trump. The author, who describes himself as a “Rockefeller Republican,” came into office by means familiar to Trump watchers as, he suspects, a compromise candidate in a power struggle between Chris Christie and Jared Kushner, with Rudy Giuliani in a corner position. It was politics from Day 1, from trying to retain independence in the Mueller investigation to the prosecution of former Trump counsel Michael Cohen. The latter had a denouement in Berman and associates’ subsequent probe into possible campaign finance violations, when newly installed Attorney General Bill Barr “not only tried to kill the ongoing investigations but—incredibly—suggested that Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed.” Thereafter, Berman writes, he was in constant struggle against Barr, who, “always eager to please his boss, appeared to be doing Trump’s bidding” by interfering in matters such as a census question on citizenship or hijinks on the part of wealthy allies of Turkey’s president, a pal of Trump’s until he wasn’t. Jeffrey Epstein, Michael Avenatti, and Steve Bannon are among the many villains of this book, but Barr is the worst of the lot: instead of protecting the Constitution, he “was looking for clever, invisible ways to let Trump undermine our rule of law.” Barr finally fired Berman by press release, and this book stands not just as a compelling look at how justice works, but also as a fine specimen of sweet revenge.
An instructive, highly readable account of the law, its protectors, and its enemies.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-30029-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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