An intelligent study of governmental overreach hampered by legal minutiae.
In this book, a writer recounts a farmer’s 15-month legal battle with the federal government.
For 40 years, 86-year-old C.P. Mincey put out a net for the purposes of catching fish in Garden City Beach, South Carolina. In 2013, while pulling in the net with his grandson, David Lane, the farmer discovered a dead dolphin caught in it. On the same day, his home was visited by two representatives of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and a federal agent from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to investigate the dolphin’s death. Mincey was later charged with a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. He was bewildered—he firmly believed he had broken no laws, and had taken every reasonable precaution to avoid inadvertently ensnaring a dolphin. In addition, hundreds of dolphins, killed by a rampant virus, had washed ashore on the East Coast in the last year, raising serious questions about the farmer’s culpability. Nevertheless, he was formally charged and hit with an inexplicably onerous fine: $6,500. Mincey was furious, and hired his son-in-law, LaFon LeGette, a veteran attorney, to represent him at a federal hearing. Walker (Alaska Highway Flight Log, 2017, etc.) follows the 15-month legal clash in granular detail, a remarkably scrupulous display of journalistic rigor. In cases like these, it’s exceedingly rare for the government to lose. The crux of the author’s account is governmental abuse of power. As LeGette contends in his closing argument: “No matter the ruling of this Court, the Government will never be able to change the fact that it has abused the rights of a law-abiding citizen and purposely sought to damage his good name in an attempt to convict him of a crime he did not commit.” But the chief virtue of Walker’s reportage doubles as its principal vice—the microscopically presented details can be overwhelming. And while LeGette’s performance is impressive, the courtroom action is generally less than dramatic—the case hinges on technicalities like the lawfulness of the government’s seizure of property and the dolphin’s cause of death.
An intelligent study of governmental overreach hampered by legal minutiae.Pub Date: June 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4575-6504-5
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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