Provocative reading that will no doubt appeal to Schneider’s fans.
A conservative-leaning comedian and Saturday Night Live alum thunders about the loss of free speech in “woke” America.
“I am a traditional Liberal, which, apparently, makes me a right-wing fascist now!” Schneider writes. When, for example, he spoke out against the Covid-19 vaccine mandates in 2021, he says, liberal media outlets made him out to be “dangerous,” but “no one in media dared call those Democrat vaccine skeptics antivaxxers like soon-to-be vice president and antivaxxer-while-Trump-is-president, Kamala Harris.” (Harris in fact said while campaigning that she wouldn’t necessarily trust Trump’s assurances about the rapidly developed vaccine but would trust a “credible” source that vouched it was safe.) Schneider also found himself targeted for holding controversial opinions on transgender surgeries for children, which he likens to a radical form of gay conversion therapy except “at least ten thousand times worse.” He praises conservative Blacks such as SCOTUS member Clarence Thomas and economist Thomas Sowell, shaking his head because asking “inconvenient questions of the 2020s government” gets them branded as “race traitors.” The comedian suggests that for these and similar views on the “scamdemic” and the unnecessary alarmism about global warming, he has become much like his stand-up idol, Lenny Bruce: a performer blackballed by mainstream late-night shows because “they don’t want an opposing point of view.” Schneider buttresses his views by citing historical events as examples of the government’s “sociopathic behavior,” such as the “Tuskegee Experiment,” in which the U.S. Public Health Service infected unsuspecting black men with syphilis for 40 years, and a CIA program that administered LSD “to unwitting subjects in social situations”—though it’s not clear what these cases have to do with the current federal government urging people to get vaccinated. “Dissent is democracy. Not allowing dissent is tyranny,” Schneider concludes. Readers need not care for his confrontational style to agree with that statement.
Provocative reading that will no doubt appeal to Schneider’s fans.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781546007869
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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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