A mixed bag of longueurs and profundities that should prove useful to students of the judicial system.
A meditation on crime, punishment, and heartache.
Blake began her legal career working for the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. The work was depressing, and after Sandy Hook and the subsequent defeat of gun-control measures in Congress, she “lost hope.” A couple of years earlier, a 16-year-old cousin of hers suffered a psychotic episode and savagely killed a young boy, a horrific act that received little publicity because of the explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon. “When the worst happens, the notion of luck takes on strange significance. What’s lucky when your son murders another mother’s son? That there is oil spilling into the ocean,” she writes. The best part of Blake’s book explores the trajectory of the crime, subsequent trial, and imprisonment of her cousin, who has been spending his life behind bars incessantly reading and teaching Bible classes while wrestling with his crime. Meaningfully, after reading Crime and Punishment, he described his crime by saying that he “took Ryan’s choices away.” Were the memoir to stick to this story, it would have been more effective, for much of it is given over to hit-or-miss meditations on heartbreak, lost love, and the like, with references to and quotations from a canon ranging from Ice Age cave paintings to the socially conscious journalism of Rebecca Solnit. Sometimes these musings are weighty (“Complicated grief is complicated because it doesn’t change shape or size; it stays unlivable”), sometimes mere soufflés: “Heartbreak’s popularity in times of great taking reveals the essence of a broken heart—what it is to have and then not have.” One wishes the author had directed her energies to the crime and how it played out; in those sections, her writing shines.
A mixed bag of longueurs and profundities that should prove useful to students of the judicial system.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-53852-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Disingenuous when not willfully oblivious.
The former vice president reflects warmly on the president whose followers were encouraged to hang him.
Pence’s calm during the Trump years has been a source of bemusement, especially during the administration’s calamitous demise. In this bulky, oddly uncurious political memoir, Pence suggests the source of his composure is simple: frequent prayer and bottomless patience for politicking. After a relatively speedy recap of his personal and political history in Indiana—born-again Christian, conservative radio host, congressman, governor—he remembers greeting the prospect of serving under Trump with enthusiasm. He “was giving voice to the desperation and frustration caused by decades of government mismanagement,” he writes. Recounting how the Trump-Pence ticket won the White House in 2016, he recalls Trump as a fundamentally hardworking president, albeit one who often shot from the hip. Yet Pence finds Trump’s impulsivity an asset, setting contentious foreign leaders and Democrats off-balance. Soon they settled into good cop–bad cop roles; he was “the gentler voice,” while “it was Trump’s job to bring the thunder.” Throughout, Pence rationalizes and forgives all sorts of thundering. Sniping at John McCain? McCain never really took the time to understand him! Revolving-door staffers? He’s running government like a business! That phone call with Ukraine’s president? Overblown! Downplaying the threat Covid-19 presented in early 2020? Evidence, somehow, of “the leadership that President Trump showed in the early, harrowing days of the pandemic.” But for a second-in-command to such a disruptive figure, Pence dwells little on Trump’s motivations, which makes the story’s climax—Trump’s 2020 election denials and the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection—impossible for him to reconcile. How could such a selfless patriot fall under the sway of bad lawyers and conspiracy theorists? God only knows. Chalk it up to Pence's forgiving nature. In the lengthy acknowledgments he thanks seemingly everybody he’s known personally or politically; but one name’s missing.
Disingenuous when not willfully oblivious.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781982190330
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A Trump idolator’s dream book. Everyone else should stay far away.
Donald Trump’s former chief of staff serves up servile homage to a man he’s sure will make a comeback bid in 2024.
No president could ask for a more fawning yes man than Meadows. Trump is a genius, a savior, the author avers in this cliché-stuffed, formulaic celebration. He’s a bulwark against what Trump calls “the Radical Left Democrat Communist Party.” That speech he gave at Mount Rushmore, if anyone remembers it? “One of the finest in American history.” Of course, Trump, God’s personal pick, didn’t really lose the 2020 election. When things go wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. For example, Trump appointed Kavanaugh and Gorsuch to the Supreme Court only for them to rule “in ways that were deeply disappointing to the MAGA movement that had made their appointments possible.” Thanks to Pelosi and the Dems, the economy, formerly strong “due to the work of President Trump and his advisors,” tanked during the pandemic. Speaking of which, “had it not been for the China Virus, we could have spent the past months reaching more voters and running up our historic vote totals even higher”—not to mention battling Fauci, Milley, and countless other enemies. If there’s a conspiracy to be found or an enemy to be named, Meadows does so. Sometimes he falls off message, as when he writes of a typical campaign rally, “the energy of these patriots, all united for a common cause, celebrating their prosperity and patriotism in a shared space, is something you can’t describe until you’re in the middle of the crowd with them.” Prosperity or forgotten/downtrodden Americans: You can’t have it both ways. As for the Jan. 6 mob? All Meadows can muster is a pale “what occurred that day was shameful”—with the immediate deflection that a few bad apples spoiled a noble showing of support for their heroic leader.
A Trump idolator’s dream book. Everyone else should stay far away.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73747-852-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: All Seasons Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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