A well-researched, profoundly relevant story of a failed judicial nomination.
Li, a legal historian and journalist, examines the failed nomination of a Depression-era Supreme Court justice.
As the descendent of one of North Carolina’s most distinguished families, John J. Parker’s ancestors included Revolutionary War veterans, two governors (one was also a U.S. senator), and one of the first six justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Parker himself was nominated by President Herbert Hoover to the Supreme Court in 1930, most journalists and political insiders assumed his confirmation was a given. Yet, despite his pedigree and tenure as young judge, not to mention his connections to some of the South’s most powerful politicians, Parker’s nomination would go down as one of the most hotly contested failed appointments in history. Nominated during the peak of Jim Crow discrimination in the South and the nascent economic collapse associated with the Great Depression, Parker confronted intense opposition from Black civil rights activists and labor organizers. As a member of the Republican Party’s “lily-white” southern faction, Parker had previously declared his support of segregation and laws that severely limited the ability of Black Americans to vote. He had also taken legal stances against the United Mine Workers of America in favor of coal companies. These positions ignited a firestorm of pressure within the Republican Party, and Parker’s nomination would be rejected in a close vote. While the campaign to take down Parker is reported in fascinating detail, what truly stands out in this book are the connections Li makes between this ideological battle of 1930 to the later politicalization of Supreme Court nominees from Robert Bork to Brett Kavanaugh; the author argues that Parker set a precedent that would define nominations across going forward. An assistant managing editor of the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, host of the Legal Rebels Podcast, and author of a book on Richard Nixon’s electoral strategy, Li blends an absorbing, accessible writing style with solid research based largely on archival and primary sources.
A well-researched, profoundly relevant story of a failed judicial nomination.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9783032078636
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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