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
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
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An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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