A thoughtful and painstaking work of legal scholarship.
Wehle delivers a critique of the unchecked presidential power to pardon.
The author astutely observes that when the presidential power to pardon was ratified in 1788 (enshrined in Article II of the United States Constitution), it granted more power to the executive branch than was currently wielded by King George III. While generally unchallenged, the power is a peculiar one when understood within the context of a constitutional republic characterized by governmental limitations and checks and balances—Wehle describes it as “a gaping level of unconstrained power.” Of course, there were reasons for this remarkable endowment of prerogative; it allows for the expression of mercy and the granting of amnesty, and the ability to “to address fragile political situations that traditional diplomacy or the rule of law cannot outpace” can be politically expedient. However, Wehle convincingly argues that the “enormous risks of abuse” outweigh the potential benefits, asserting that such a mandate naively assumes a “fairness and integrity” with respect to the one who exercises it. In this intellectually challenging study, the author traces the complex history of the pardon power—as exercised by kings, parliaments, and clergy—and diligently charts its excesses. She recognizes the great hurdles to reforming it, chiefly the need for a constitutional amendment. There are ways to curb its abuse, she avers, including making pardon power subject to increased transparency and constraining the lobbying for pardons from presidents. Wehle’s prose is impressively lucid and accessible, particularly welcome virtues given the technical nature of the subject matter; none of her arguments presuppose that readers have specialized backgrounds in either law or American history, though either would be helpful. At the very least, she poses a provocative challenge to what is often seen as an “unlimited and sacrosanct” convention and manages to “reveal that the pardon power deserves attention and cannot be whisked atop a pedestal on the blithe assumption that the Constitution (for presidents, at least) unequivocally says this power is acceptable.”
A thoughtful and painstaking work of legal scholarship.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781954907508
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Woodhall Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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