A must-read for politics-watchers.
Thoughtfully prepared edition of the public-domain report issued by the U.S. House of Representatives.
In the eyes of the Jan. 6 Committee, the principal agent of the attempted coup was Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump incited insurrectionists well before his famous “will be wild” tweet, and he called those insurrectionists off, after what the committee deemed “187 minutes of dereliction,” only when “it was obvious that the riot would fail to stop the certification of the vote.” This exhaustive report, like its hearings, is structured thematically, with sections devoted to such issues as the insurrectionist groups whom Trump and his allies recruited, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who invoked not just 1776, but also the Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace. (“No historical event has been less American.”) Another section treats the bizarre legal theories advanced by John Eastman, who “concluded that President Trump could remain president if—and only if—Vice President Pence followed Eastman’s illegal advice and determined which electoral college ballots were ‘valid.’ ” Apart from punishment of the criminals, the committee recommends some actions that are likely to cause controversy (and which will doubtless be ignored by the Republican-majority House in January 2023—e.g., the call to monitor media companies (read Fox, OAN, et al.) whose programming has “had the effect of radicalizing their consumers, including by provoking people to attack their own country.” This edition, prepared in conjunction with the New Yorker, includes excellent commentary by David Remnick, who has long been reporting on related events. Sometimes snippy, as when he refers to the insurrectionists’ “cosplay battle gear,” Remnick provides useful context, while committee member Jamie Raskin adds recommendations to the report, including direct election of presidents and abolition of the Electoral College in order to “break out of the GOP’s matrix of democracy suppression.”
A must-read for politics-watchers.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2022
ISBN: 9781250877529
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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