by John Fund ; Hans von Spakovsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2014
The book leans decidedly to the right, but Fund and von Spakovsky raise issues of partisan intrigue, dishonesty and...
Fund and von Spakovsky (Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk, 2012) team up again for a no-holds-barred assault on Attorney General Eric Holder.
Both authors are well-known shapers of conservative opinion, and von Spakovsky, of George W. Bush’s Justice Department, so the authors include certain ongoing issues promoted by the right. These include, among others, the 2009-2011 “Operation Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal, during which the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were investigated for distributing weapons in Mexico subsequently used with deadly effect against American border enforcement agents. As a result, Holder became the first attorney general in history to be held in contempt of Congress, but Democrats voted overwhelmingly in support of Holder. What Fund and von Spakovsky have put together in this account seems to merit thoughtful consideration rather than peremptory dismissal as yet another partisan assault. For example, they ask why Holder's accounts of when he learned about the gunwalking scandal differed significantly in the versions he presented before the House and the Senate—and the differences have not been reconciled. The authors point to numerous Supreme Court decisions that question the legality and honesty of actions undertaken by Holder's department, and they discuss a number of criminal and civil prosecutions that have been dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct, including lying and withholding exculpatory evidence. Fund and von Spakovsky also question his practice of unilaterally changing interpretations of laws—e.g., the 1961 Interstate Wire Act. The authors detail the chilling effects of censorship and raise some intriguing issues about the conduct of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
The book leans decidedly to the right, but Fund and von Spakovsky raise issues of partisan intrigue, dishonesty and criminality, with sufficient evidence to merit serious investigation and not just partisan dismissal.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232092-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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