A sharp-edged work of legal journalism that will fascinate politics junkies.
Legal commentator Toobin examines the power of presidents to pardon others—and perhaps themselves.
“There is…no check or balance on the president’s power to pardon. It is the provision of the Constitution most directly descended from the authority of kings of England,” writes Toobin. His exemplar throughout is Richard Nixon, who might have pardoned those whose work led to his downfall but instead sought precedent that would allow him to pardon himself. Some of his advisers, especially Al Haig, argued that whatever the Constitution does not specifically prohibit is permitted, while a legal opinion from the Justice Department likened self-pardon to a judge conducting his own trial. Nixon negotiated a pardon from Gerald Ford, who had earlier promised the public that he would not grant one; what swayed Ford were documents that Nixon had squirreled away, much as Donald Trump did at the end of his first term. “Seen in this way,” writes Toobin, “Nixon used his papers as a form of extortion—and it worked.” Trump, too, has studied self-pardon, tweeting with characteristic bombast, “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” Ford took a shellacking for pardoning Nixon, although Toobin persuasively argues that the pardon wasn’t the make-or-break reason for his defeat in the 1976 election that it has been made out to be. Interestingly, too, Toobin observes that had Nixon looked beyond his close circle of advisers, he would have discovered that the Justice Department “had no intention of prosecuting Nixon,” just as, it seems, the department is walking away from Trump.
A sharp-edged work of legal journalism that will fascinate politics junkies.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781668084946
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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
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