An authoritative indictment of a denial-plagued presidential run.
Why so few spoke up.
This tough yet fair account of an aging president’s inauspicious reelection campaign makes a strong case that voters deserve to know more about their commander-in-chief’s health. Joe Biden won in 2020 pledging to serve as “a bridge” to the next generation of Democrats, but his second-term bid, which promulgated “the lie” that he wasn’t experiencing “cognitive diminishment,” became “a charade that delivered the election” to Donald Trump. So say Tapper, a CNN anchor, and Thompson, an Axios political reporter. Their robust reporting—they interviewed about 200 people in and around the campaign—reveals that Biden showed worrying signs of age-related memory loss in 2019 and that, according to an unnamed insider, he was not always the sole boss during his presidency: “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.” First Lady Jill Biden and a small group of Biden loyalists were among “the chief deniers of his deterioration.” His staffers shut down intraparty discussions about his fitness for four more years; scheduled far fewer interviews and press conferences than his recent predecessors; questioned the professionalism of reporters working on news stories about Biden’s memory struggles; and regularly withheld “bad news” from the president, even declining to show him polling that suggested he was losing to Trump. Why? Because “politics is addictive,” according to one prominent Democrat. Meanwhile, “no one wanted to be on the outside in case he did win,” said a party donor. The authors suggest that Congress should consider legislation requiring a doctor for sitting presidents to swear to give detailed medical reports. As one physician tells the authors, “the yearly letter from the president’s doctor is basically a tradition,” not a legal requirement.
An authoritative indictment of a denial-plagued presidential run.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798217060672
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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