Think of it as a user-friendly—and utterly damning—explication of the Mueller Report. Read it. Then vote.
Has Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses? Yes—and then some, as New Yorker writer and CNN legal analyst Toobin chronicles in this catalog of crime.
Robert Mueller concluded his investigation of the president’s misdoings by grouping them into two broad categories. One, examining Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, was inconclusive even though Mueller “had uncovered a genuinely massive conspiracy in Russia, stretching from the military to the private sector, to interfere in the most solid rite of our democracy”—namely, the 2016 presidential election. The other was Trump’s flagrant obstruction of justice in acts committed before, during, and after the investigation, as when he fired FBI director James Comey soon after entering office. Trump has never bothered to even give the impression that he is not corrupt; when the impeachment proceedings began in 2019, he reacted by threatening and blustering while taking care not to leave a paper trail. That has always been his way, as his former attorney Michael Cohen has documented, and “Mueller’s report, if read carefully, establishes that Trump committed several acts of criminal obstruction of justice.” Toobin delivers a painstakingly constructed record of Trump’s crimes, never mincing words: For example, were it not for Rudolph Giuliani’s ineptitude as an attorney, “Donald Trump would not have been impeached.” In the months since his impeachment, Trump has bungled everything he’s touched. For one, writes Toobin, “Trump addressed the coronavirus the same way that he confronted his Russia and Ukraine scandals—with bluster, blame shifting, vindictiveness, and lies.” It’s a depressing record, and Toobin’s careful narrative yields mostly despair for the fate of the republic. As he concludes, “For Trump, his presidency was more about him that what he could accomplish,” and what Trump has accomplished is mostly destruction.
Think of it as a user-friendly—and utterly damning—explication of the Mueller Report. Read it. Then vote.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-53673-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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