A provocative and well-considered argument stressing the necessity of maintaining the sanctity of hard-won liberties.
A spirited defense of the political and civil rights that Americans enjoy—and that are constantly being chipped away.
In the middle of the pandemic in July 2020, a nationwide poll showed that 71% of Americans believed that “Americans have more in common than many people think.” By May 2021, that figure was 88%, a stunning supermajority. What holds these Americans together, maintain the authors, faculty members at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, is our portfolio of rights, constitutional and agreed-upon and even some that we haven’t figured out yet. On the last point, the authors reveal that most Americans hold generous—liberal, even—views on the rights of immigrants, to say nothing of police reform, equal rights for minorities, and the like. The fundamental right is the right to vote, and that is precisely the one that the authors hold is most endangered by the rise of neo-authoritarian attempts to disenfranchise voters, “a direct assault on the voting rights of the electoral majority that had defeated [Trump].” Though the authors try not to evoke the former president too often, they lay many assaults on rights at the door of the previous administration, including the unstated right to have a civil conversation about politics without incorporating that administration’s “vast official landscape of disinformation and misinformation.” Though the authors add that “ideological tension is a foundation of a healthy democracy,” so, too, is a shared standard of objective truth. But the authors show how few institutions are invested in teaching people how to distinguish fact from lie. On that note, they conclude, perhaps controversially, that federal legislation should be enacted to regulate social media and “require algorithms to be used safely and responsibly to promote freedom of speech and protect against racial, gender, religious, disability, or LGBTQ discrimination.”
A provocative and well-considered argument stressing the necessity of maintaining the sanctity of hard-won liberties.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62097-724-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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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