An enjoyably readable and fascinating day-by-day account of a landmark Supreme Court case.
Proto’s nonfiction account follows law students crusading for a monumental legal victory.
The author looks back to 1971, when he was at George Washington University spearheading Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures, a group fighting the environmental destruction caused by major railroads by pursuing their liability under President Richard Nixon’s new National Environmental Policy Act. Proto led a group of five GWU law students in a legal battle that gradually expanded to pit them against the United States government and bring the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The author draws on copious legal case law history and all kinds of contemporaneous notes and memoranda to present the progression of the case with novelistic flair and pacing. “The ICC was not familiar to any of us,” reads one such passage. “We knew it regulated railroads, pipelines and motor carriers. We acquired the knowledge we needed in four ways: reading history, reading cases, reading Nader, and sharing personal experiences.” Proto fills the text with photos of all of the places and people in his story. He makes the wise decision throughout his narrative to refrain from hyperbole, and this restrained approach very effectively underscores the skill and even the heroism of his central cast of characters (“Our imperative from the fall of 1971 was to discern corporate wrongdoing that harmed the public and to examine the failure of government in its public duty—as prescribed by laws enacted by Congress—to confront and correct it”). Despite his long personal history as a lawyer and writer on legal matters, the author entirely avoids the tedious procedural minutiae that often hamper works of legal nonfiction like this one. The personalities he draws are sharp and ready-made for a Hollywood adaptation, and his insider’s look at how the Supreme Court works is fascinating in its own right, at once enormously informative and genuinely entertaining.
An enjoyably readable and fascinating day-by-day account of a landmark Supreme Court case.Pub Date: April 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781039180499
Page Count: 348
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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