A distressing account of how power often trumps justice within the American criminal justice system.
Cogent analysis of how privileged individuals skirt criminal prosecution.
After a frustrating attempt to bring a crime-syndicate kingpin to justice, CNN senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Honig began to delve into the too-common phenomenon of wealthy, influential people avoiding punishment. Some of this material he covered in his previous book, Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. Here, the author assesses the ways that privilege and power are used to game the legal system, exploring the tactics used by savvy, ruthless individuals to exploit flaws in the prosecutorial and judicial processes. In clear, concisely written sections, Honig digs into the evasive tactics employed by the well connected, how jury service can be intimidating, and how human and institutional biases affect how the rules and procedures of a lawsuit are followed (or ignored). Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, is just one of many high-profile villains Honig spotlights. Examining cases involving Steven Bannon, Roger Stone, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and, of course, Trump himself, the author notes the difficulties facing prosecuting attorneys in exacting justice amid a mountain of red tape, legal acrobatics, walls of financial blocks—and often despite smoking-gun evidence. Though Honig devotes attention to the executive privilege of a variety of nefarious billionaires and politicians, he focuses mostly on the bewildering acquittal record of Trump, a “lawless Houdini.” Despite multiple impeachments, damning congressional findings, and hush-money payments, miraculously, Trump has never been formally charged with a crime. He remains “unburdened by ethics, shame, or even a logical sense of self-preservation.” Outside of urging prosecutors to think more like their clients, using “creativity and aggression,” Honig doesn’t offer any solid solutions, but he does provide clarity about how the institutional justice system is “stacked in favor of powerful, wealthy, famous people,” most of whom avoid accountability for their crimes.
A distressing account of how power often trumps justice within the American criminal justice system.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063241503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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