An opinionated but persuasive call to think a little more kindly of the highest court in the land.
A measured defense of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, writes lawyer and conservative activist Isgur, was unusual among the tangles of the federal government in being generally popular, with an approval rating of 70% as recently as 2020. Now, however, “for the first time, more people disapprove of the Court than approve of it.” This owes much to decisions that would seem to be politically driven, such as granting President Trump blanket immunity for acts committed in office that just might turn out to be illegal. It’s not as sweeping as all that, Isgur counsels: There’s still a distinction between official and private acts in play, and while it doesn’t help that the decision’s language is so vague that “the real answer is…that nobody knows,” the decision, she suggests, was less partisan than a protection against political persecution of the opposition—which is just what’s happening, albeit emanating from and not toward the White House. The central problem is both simple and deeply complex, and it turns on the fact that the legislative branch isn’t anywhere close to doing its job, allowing the executive to run rampant while putting the judiciary in the untenable position of making law rather than interpreting it. There are any number of remedies to the court’s ills, Isgur writes, including imposing “an enforceable ethics code.” Even more revolutionary might be a constitutional guarantee allowing each president to appoint two justices, so that the number on the bench might be as high as 13, assuming term limits are indeed set. But in the end, Isgur—who has good and evenhanded things to say about every currently sitting justice—demands that Congress, now constituting “one big dog and 434 yapping backbenchers with no hope of legislating their way into reelection or relevancy,” actually start doing what it’s in business to do.
An opinionated but persuasive call to think a little more kindly of the highest court in the land.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780593800928
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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
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