An enjoyably readable and fascinating day-by-day account of a landmark Supreme Court case.
Proto’s nonfiction account follows law students crusading for a monumental legal victory.
The author looks back to 1971, when he was at George Washington University spearheading Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures, a group fighting the environmental destruction caused by major railroads by pursuing their liability under President Richard Nixon’s new National Environmental Policy Act. Proto led a group of five GWU law students in a legal battle that gradually expanded to pit them against the United States government and bring the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The author draws on copious legal case law history and all kinds of contemporaneous notes and memoranda to present the progression of the case with novelistic flair and pacing. “The ICC was not familiar to any of us,” reads one such passage. “We knew it regulated railroads, pipelines and motor carriers. We acquired the knowledge we needed in four ways: reading history, reading cases, reading Nader, and sharing personal experiences.” Proto fills the text with photos of all of the places and people in his story. He makes the wise decision throughout his narrative to refrain from hyperbole, and this restrained approach very effectively underscores the skill and even the heroism of his central cast of characters (“Our imperative from the fall of 1971 was to discern corporate wrongdoing that harmed the public and to examine the failure of government in its public duty—as prescribed by laws enacted by Congress—to confront and correct it”). Despite his long personal history as a lawyer and writer on legal matters, the author entirely avoids the tedious procedural minutiae that often hamper works of legal nonfiction like this one. The personalities he draws are sharp and ready-made for a Hollywood adaptation, and his insider’s look at how the Supreme Court works is fascinating in its own right, at once enormously informative and genuinely entertaining.
An enjoyably readable and fascinating day-by-day account of a landmark Supreme Court case.Pub Date: April 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781039180499
Page Count: 348
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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