A prime source for those following the chain of trials awaiting the disgraced former president.
The full story behind Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to fix the vote in Georgia.
The spur for Fani Willis to file charges against Trump, write veteran journalists Isikoff and Klaidman, was Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, with Trump’s much-aired plea, “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Willis, a county prosecutor, has been accused of reaching beyond her bailiwick, but one end of that recorded call happened in her county, the other in Florida—and though Florida requires that both parties to a call consent to its being recorded, that requirement is waived in the case of law enforcement. Isikoff and Klaidman reveal that Trump was fixated on Georgia, which he fervently believed he should have won, overlooking the increasing blueness of the state’s most populous counties. He was seemingly obsessed with the thought that two Black election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, had miscounted the vote to deliver the state to Biden. As Freeman later remarked, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” Trump’s “laser-focus” on Georgia yielded much illegal activity from his administration and followers, including a plot to plant a slate of false electors, but also threats of violence against election workers and officials. One recipient was Raffensperger, who was oddly reluctant all the same to participate in Willis’ case, having “made it clear from the start that if he was going to talk, he wanted a grand jury subpoena first.” In many respects, Isikoff and Klaidman make Willis’ case for her, though it awaits a courtroom airing, and they document beyond reasonable doubt the desperate efforts of Trump and company to subvert the democratic process.
A prime source for those following the chain of trials awaiting the disgraced former president.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781538739990
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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