A valuable set of program notes; readers will eagerly wait to see if prosecutors act as Snell hopes they will.
A trial lawyer explores the many ways that Donald Trump has succeeded in evading punishment—and how to thwart him henceforth.
Snell, who successfully prosecuted Trump for the Trump University fraud, argues that when confronted with lawsuits or criminal charges, Trump is his own worst enemy, “a cheap, predatory asshole who doesn’t pay his bills” and who doesn’t listen to his own underqualified lawyers. Trump has managed to stay out of trouble, Snell opines, by using tactics that can be overcome. One is the mob-boss trick of intimidating witnesses, which a few recently delivered gag rules haven’t done much to curb—but, if the judges do their jobs, could land Trump in jail. “If at all possible, get Trump under oath—and he will hang himself,” Snell urges. It’s possible but unlikely, writes the author, that Trump will agree on a plea deal that will still land him in prison, for the walls are closing in. “He’s losing in court, and he knows it,” Snell writes, “so now he’s aiming to undermine the courts entirely, to declare them all illegitimate.” But the courts are where he is, and it’s not because anyone’s out to get him. As Snell observes, he’s in court in 2023 and 2024 because he committed a swarm of alleged crimes in 2020 and 2021, and it takes a couple of years for things to go before the bench. When the former president lashes out at his legal opponents, most viciously against women and especially women of color, take that as a sign that the prosecutors are on the right track. Cheapness, narcissism, bullying: They’re not likely to work this time, Snell concludes, as they have for so many years in the past.
A valuable set of program notes; readers will eagerly wait to see if prosecutors act as Snell hopes they will.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781685891251
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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