Like eating dessert first, if your idea of dessert is despair flavored with rage.
A bound copy of the text of the dissenting opinions in the recent watershed case.
As the title (printed in massive letters on the cover) hints, the dissenting opinion fronts this publication of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That is the only change made to the text, which is freely available on the court’s website. The book contains no annotations nor any other concessions to lay readers, who will find themselves picking their way through the document’s many impenetrable citations—e.g., “See Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees, 585 U. S. ___, ___, ___–___ (2018) (slip op., at 42, 47–49).” This publication’s chief assets are its portability and, for readers who disagree with the majority as fervently as the dissenting justices do, the bolstering reassurance that at least someone understands the bedrock need for bodily autonomy as a prerequisite of liberty before they tackle the majority opinion, penned by Samuel Alito. (Readers accustomed to the conventions of legal writing may not blink at his sevenfold repetition that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong,” but to lay readers it layers on the spite.) While literary gems are few, some passages may elicit a hollow chuckle or two. At one point, the dissenters mock Alito’s assertion that other rights associated with Roe, such as the right to contraception or marriage equality, are not at risk: “The majority tells everyone not to worry. It can (so it says) neatly extract the right to choose from the constitutional edifice without affecting any associated rights. (Think of someone telling you that the Jenga tower simply will not collapse.)” The unavoidable result of beginning with the dissent, however, is that readers will be faced with not only the majority opinion, but also the three concurrences—Clarence Thomas’ (strident), Brett Kavanaugh’s (vacuous), and John Roberts’ (insipid)—before finishing the book.
Like eating dessert first, if your idea of dessert is despair flavored with rage.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68589-051-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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