Required reading for this post-Dobbs world.
The senior legal correspondent for Slate looks at the responses of women lawyers to the Trump era.
“Something extraordinary happens when female anger and lawyering meet,” writes Lithwick, who begins with oral arguments in the 2016 case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt before three female justices. She closes, of course, with the June 24, 2022, decision in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization. In the author’s telling, that span represents not only the nation’s six-year slide into an abyss, but also a time when women lawyers mounted dogged, directed resistance. Between starry-eyed opening and grim conclusion, she profiles women lawyers whose stories provide a contextualizing capsule tour of the era and offer some bracing hope. Readers will reconnect with Sally Yates, the acting attorney general who almost immediately found herself standing up to her new boss when he executed his first travel ban, and learn that the Democrats’ success in Georgia in 2020 and 2021 was mostly due to Stacey Abrams’ methodical, 10-year plan to mobilize Georgia’s Democratic vote. We also meet Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who successfully litigated against adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census; and the ACLU’s Brigitte Amiri, who defended the right of a pregnant 17-year-old refugee in U.S. custody to get an abortion—ultimately winning a case in which then–Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s preliminary opinion arguably paved his way to the Supreme Court. In this same profile, the author reveals that the same Office of Refugee Resettlement apparatchik who directed his staff to stop keeping track of the children separated from their families at the border also scrupulously maintained his own records of the menstrual cycles of the girls in custody. Though the text is necessarily bristling with names of court cases, Lithwick’s writing is friendly to lay readers and marked by her trademark pithy wit and an endearing faith in the promise of the legal system. “Women plus law equals magic,” she concludes.
Required reading for this post-Dobbs world.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-56138-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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