nonfiction – Page 9 – BookAnon.com

August 13, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: Kent State by Brian VanDeMark

Well Documented History Of The Event. The massacre at Kent State happened when my parents were not quite 10 yrs old and still almost as long away from meeting. It wouldn’t be until over a decade after this event when they wed, and I was born just a couple of years later. One uncle was already nearly 30 by the time of the massacre, and my youngest aunt was still in middle single digits at the time. The rest of my dozen or so aunts and uncles were somewhere in between, including at least a couple of them that were college age at the time, and one that fought in Vietnam in this era. (I’m not sure exactly when he was deployed there, but I *know* he went and did… something. He was a career Marine, beginning then.) All of this is a long way of saying that this is a history of events that preceded me, but which my direct family knew of at various ages of their own lives and saw how it affected each of them.

Thus, other than the barest of facts of “there was a protest, the National Guard got called in, and the Guard shot and killed a few students”… I never really knew about the details of this massacre before reading this book. I’ve never read any of the other histories, I’ve never really seen it covered much at all – and certainly not to this detail – in any other medium. So I can’t really say if it has any “new” information about the event and its fallout.

What I *can* say about this book is that it is very well documented, with 23% of its text being official bibliography, and the extensive footnotes throughout the text probably adding another couple of percentage points, *maybe* up to an additional 5% or so. Bringing the total documentation here to somewhere in the 25-28% range, which is pretty solid in my extensive review work of the last several years – I’ve read books making far stronger claims than this that had far less documentation.

This book is also exceedingly detailed in its presentation of the events of those few days in May at this campus, giving brief biographical sketches of pretty well every single person named- be they victim, shooter, parent, lawyer, politician, commander, or anything else- and detailing with a fair degree of precision exactly where each person was in the periods before, during, and after the massacre. Up to and including which shooters had which guns pointing which directions. Indeed, one of the most tragic and explicit parts of this book is just how graphically the shots are described as they hit the 13 victims, and indeed there are some photographs of some of the bodies included in the text as well. So for those that get particularly squeamish about such details… you may want to skim over these bits. But also don’t, because VanDeMark’s presentation here, though excessively detailed, also does a tremendous job of showing just how tragic the event was.

To be clear, VanDeMark presents a remarkably *balanced* history as well, not really siding with either side in the debate as to who was at fault, simply presenting the available facts and showing how tragic it was that a group of young adults were all in this situation to begin with, from all of the varying sides. Indeed, perhaps this is the greatest overall strength of the text at hand – in its balance, we are allowed to get perhaps the truest picture available of what is known to have occurred and when, allowing the reader to decide for themselves, with their own biases, who was at fault and why.

After detailing the events of the day, VanDeMark closes the narrative with following the various efforts at criminal and civil trials of the shooters as well as various efforts to memorialize the events before moving on to how each of the survivors – family of the dead, the surviving victims, the shooters, and the various officials – handled the events of that weekend the rest of their lives, reaching right up into the 2020s.

Overall a truly detailed, graphic at times, and moving text, and one anyone with any interest at all in the subject should read.

Very much recommended.

This review of Kent State by Brian VanDeMark was originally written on August 13, 2024.

August 10, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: The Jailer’s Reckoning by Kevin B. Smith

Is Michelle Alexander Wrong? Not even that arguably, one of the most cited texts in the field of mass incarceration examinations is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which alleges that the rise of mass incarceration is *solely* due to racism. Here, Smith puts that claim – and many others, including competing theories alleging racism has nothing to do with it at all – to the test, and, well, as he notes early in the text… pretty well *no* partisan is going to be happy with what he finds. He proclaims – and throughout the text shows – that almost no matter what you think causes mass incarceration… you’re probably at least partially wrong.

I’m not going to get into his actual conclusions here, you need to read this book for yourself to see them.

I will say that the text is reasonably well documented, clocking in at 23% of the text I read and with Smith claiming to have an even more extensive online appendix (which I have not examined at review time) detailing his methodologies used throughout the text.

Ultimately this is a short ish (sub 200 page) yet dense read, accessible to the non-scholar (in that the methodology discussion *is* left to said online appendix) yet still with a *lot* of at least discussion of the mathematical results (if a bit of hand waving about *precisely* how he got there, likely more detailed in that appendix). Still, if you’re interested in the causes of mass incarceration, what mass incarceration is costing the US, and at least a few potential suggestions on what might be looked into for potential solutions… this is actually a remarkable text, one that *should* supplant Alexander’s as among the most cited in the field. We’ll see if that happens. 😉

Very much recommended.

This review of The Jailer’s Reckoning by Kevin B. Smith was originally written on August 10, 2024.

July 31, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Does NOT Predict July 2024 Assassination Attempt of President Trump. This is a book I’ve had for a few years now – apparently I purchased my copy in 2020, several years after it had been out, and I just this month read it after an Acton Institute Fellow claimed on Twitter that this book “predicted in 2012” that something like the assassination attempt of President Trump would occur. (Screenshot of tweet in question is below. Link is here: https://x.com/drantbradley/status/1812266568140628252.)

To be clear, if there is any indication at all of such a prediction, I must have missed it somehow.

Instead, what this book *does* do is show Haidt’s own work as a psychology based sociologist, studying both societies and how the brain gets to the decisions it makes. Here, Haidt actually has a lot of seemingly solid ideas… though it is clear in looking through the one star reviews that few on the left appreciate his candor, despite his own admitted background (and presumptive leanings at the time of writing this, at minimum, back in 2011 or so) being as a leftist himself.

Yet Haidt makes his points clearly and logically, and actively builds concepts up rather than just expecting the reader to understand complex points from the get-go. The narrative is well laid out, and the overall writing is such that nearly anyone should be able to follow along reasonably well.

I can’t speak to the bibliography, as I listened to the Audible form of this book and thus don’t have access to that particular information.

Thus, all that I can see here, all that I experienced here, was a reasonably well written, clearly thought out narrative structure that made clear Haidt’s own work and the work of others in his field in a way that proves particularly illuminating and worthy of conisderation.

Indeed, in the points Haidt actually makes within this text, we can all learn to understand each other quite a bit better… which actually leans to this book *not* predicting any assassination attempts on current or former Presidents.

Still, I’m glad I finally got around to reading this book, and I absolutely recommend you do too… just don’t think it makes any predictions on current events. (It doesn’t.)

Very much recommended.

This review of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt was originally written on July 31, 2024.

July 31, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: No Democracy Lasts Forever by Erwin Chemerinsky

Unoriginal Hyper-Leftist Wet Dream. In all honesty, had I known that Chemerinsky was the Dean of the Berkely School of Law, I probably would never have picked up this book to begin with. I would have already known most of what he was going to say… and now having actually read it, I can positively say that 95% of my assumptions would have been correct.

Basically, however you feel about the Citizens United ruling, recent SCOTUS decisions, packing the Court, the Electoral College, and the well-debunked “Russian Collusion” conspiracy theory from the 2016 Presidential Election is largely how you’re going to feel about this book. It honestly reads as little more than hyper-leftist dreams about everything that has gone “wrong” with America for the last decade or two. Thus, some of you are going to sing this book’s praises from the highest places you can as loudly as you can. And some of you are going to want to take a window to those places just so you can be assured that you will be able to defenestrate this book from those places.

Chemerinsky *does* get *close* to some genuinely good ideas, ideas that could *actually* solve a lot of the problems he names… and then quickly backs away from them, for the most part. His one consistent good idea is that the process of “Winner Take All” as it relates to Electoral College votes does in fact need to end – a stance I’ve had for much of my adult life, particularly my politically engaged adult life. The more interesting things that he addresses but then thinks *secession* is more viable are as they relate to the number of Congressmen. Chemerinsky correctly points out that the only thing limiting the size of the US House to 435 members is a US law passed less than a century ago – and laws can be overturned in a number of ways. Here again, one weakness of Chemerinsky is that in proclaiming the Constitution a threat – and even spending quite a bit of the text here decrying the SCOTUS as a threat – he openly advocates for SCOTUS to take action against this law. But even this idea is hardly original, as people across the political spectrum have been proposing it for many years already.

Another point Chemerinsky gets truly close to a near-original idea (it has been proposed by at least one writer) is when he proposes – briefly, before quickly retracting it and dismissing it as unworkable – that States be broken into “smaller States”. But if “Democracy” is truly the end goal, and Chemerinsky wants everyone across the US to be as truly even as possible, why isn’t he going full-bore here? As others have written, first, build the House up to its Constitutionally mandated maximum size – every Congressman represents exactly 35,000 people, the Constitutionally mandated minimum number of people per Representative. That gives us something like 11K US Representatives. Now, take Chemerinsky’s own note here that “smaller States” would each get 2 US Senators… and make every single one of those US Rep Districts its own State. That would mean that every US Rep represents 35K people… and every Senator represents 35,000 / 2 == 17,500 people each. Meaning that for every 35,000 people, on average 1 Congressman of some level represents just under 12,000 people. Which in some urban areas is considerably less than an entire block, and in some rural areas could be several hundred square miles of territory. But Chemerinsky doesn’t go here, instead he just continually reiterates hyper leftist talking points rather than seeking actual solutions to the problems he decries.

Ultimately, I deducted two stars from this book – the first is for the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 12% of the text I read weeks before publication. Even being generous and lowering my 20-30% standard, as I’ve been trying to do of late, I just can’t justify allowing such a small bibliography against such grand claims. Even here, the bibliography itself is quite cherry picked and doesn’t show the full scope of what is going on through many of Chemerinsky’s claims, but I’ve never really addressed that issue in other reviews and won’t really address it here either.

The other star really was for the lack of objectivity and just how unoriginal very nearly everything about this book was. If you’ve seen nearly any left-leaning politician or activist speak in the last 20 years, they’re all saying much of the same things Chemerinsky is saying here – including more and more of them openly talking of secession, which would be ruinous on us all.

Again, at the end of the day your feelings about this book are largely going to hinge on just how ideologically aligned with extreme leftist US politics you are, so know that when making your decision to read this book. Some of you are going to LOVE this book, and others are going to HATE it, and it will largely be for exactly the same reasons.

July 23, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: Decade of Disunion by Robert W. Merry

Interesting History That Doesn’t Really Fulfill Its Premise. As a general history of the titular “Decade of Disunion”, this is actually a reasonably well written and documented look at the overall political situation in the US in the decade (and then some) just before the onset of the American Civil War, including solid biographical overviews of several of the key players- both the actual key players and the ones Merry chooses to try to focus on, namely those from South Carolina and Massachusetts.

But that is actually where the book fails to really drive home its purported premise, that these leaders from these two States in particular played particularly important/ oversized roles in the events of the decade, in the events that lead to war. There really is just *so much* that happened in that decade that lead to disunion, and so much of it happened outside the States of South Carolina and Massachusetts – and even outside the District of Columbia – that it really was quite a stretch to claim that *any* two States could have played outsized roles in all of it, though in picking States that did in fact lead in the opposing ideals, Merry perhaps at least came closer than other potential selections.

Truly an excellent primer on the decade, with 18% of the text being bilbiography and thus a solid set of documentation/ further reading, this book even includes several examples of what made that particular decade so turbulent throughout the nation – including both the caning of a sitting Congressman *inside Capitol Hill* and the resultant comment from a Congressman – also quoted in James A. Morone’s 2020 book Republic Of Wrath – that if a Congressman didn’t have two pistols on his person *on Capitol Hill*, it was because he had a pistol and a knife.

I read this book in the days before the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, and I’m writing this review on the day this book releases, less than 48 hours after President Biden’s announcement that he would not seek a second term – and while President Biden hasn’t been seen in public in days now, somehow the Director of the US Secret Service still has her job. In other words, quite turbulent times indeed in this country.

But as Merry points out early, often, and frequently throughout this text – as turbulent as these times are, there have indeed been much, much worse. So pick up this book – and the aforementioned Morone text – and learn a degree of historical perspective that is desperately needed in these times.

Very much recommended.

This review of Decade of Disunion by Robert W. Merry was originally written on July 23, 2024.

July 12, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: Beyond Policing by Philip V. McHarris

Laughably Dumb? You Decide. This is another of those books where my own experience with the topic absolutely plays into my judgement here, so up front: I’m an Autistic who studied police brutality for years after some… unfortunate… (though mild, comparatively) encounters with police throughout my life. I actually became quite an expert in tracking police murders, helping with a now-defunct project similar to MappingThePolice – MTP being a project McHarris cites in this text. I was also active in CopBlock many years ago after watching its founders have their own unjust encounter with police. I’ve even known one of the victims – though to be clear, I knew him as a toddler and it was over a decade later that he was murdered by police. I’m a former Libertarian Party official at both State and local levels and 2x rural small town City Council candidate. I’ve even given a presentation at the Georgia Sociological Association’s conference. Which is a lot to say that while Mr. McHarris has me beat as far as degrees go, I’m not some bum off the street who doesn’t have both lived and academic experience with this topic as well. 🙂

As to the title of this review and the substance of the book, really all you need to know here is that Mr. McHarris’ aforementioned degree, at least one of them, is in African American studies from Yale. That alone clues you in immediately to the extreme leftist and even racist bent you’re going to get from this book, either proclaiming all white people as racist or dismissing white concerns related to the topic. How you feel about that bent is largely how you’re going to feel about this book. Also, to be clear, the actual “Laughably Dumb” bit was the comment a friend made when I showed them a one of the points we’ll get to below. 🙂

But wait! It gets better! First, some truly, truly great things: 1) The documentation, though slanted, is at least reasonably thorough, clocking in at around 20% of the text. Using the Sagan Rule (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”), perhaps that might not be enough for the claims of this text. But it *does* fall in line with the norm of my experience with similar texts, and at least some of the sources cited are some of the very same ones I would cite as well, were I writing a book on this topic myself – including The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Rise Of The Warrior Cop by Radley Balko (whose history of policing is far more complete and balanced than the one McHarris offers in the first third of this text), and Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts, among others. Furthermore, though from a clearly extreme leftist position, McHarris does indeed offer some interesting ideas at times, delusional though they may be in terms of his exact preference of implementation. But at least he is proposing *something*, and some of the ideas truly have merit.

And then we get to the stuff where you really need to decide how laughable you think they are. For one, McHarris proclaims the LA riots after the Rodney King beating to be an “uprising against police”, and uses similar “uprising” language to denote the mass riots of 2020. As if that weren’t bad enough, McHarris, while still coming from an “all whites are evil racists” perspective, openly advocates for “direct participatory democracy” to make “all” political decisions. Can you, dear reader of my review, please tell me why that may be a *horrible* idea indeed for minorities? As in, if you truly believe that all white people are evil racists and that there is nothing good about them, why would you want to give them such absolute power in so many areas?

Ultimately, it is this very utopian failure to fully consider his own thoughts and their ramifications that I believe is an objective enough reason to deduct the star here. As noted above, the documentation is reasonably solid enough and McHarris cites some of the very same texts I would (and do) on this topic. Some of the general ideas for moving away from police and of the need to at least consider how it could actually be done are reasonably well thought out, at least in initial conception of end goal and *rough* parameters. But McHarris is clearly blinded by his own ideology in just how doomed to failure so many of his implementations truly are, and for that reason I simply can’t award all five stars.

As I said from the beginning, you decide, dear reader of my review, what you’re going to think of this book. I absolutely think everyone should read it, just know that roughly half of you, perhaps more, are going to want to defenestrate it from the highest available window fairly early and fairly often. Still, stick through it. Finish it. Review it yourself. And *then* defenestrate it, if you truly need to. 🙂

Very much recommended.

This review of Beyond Policing by Philip V. McHarris was originally written on July 12, 2024.

July 5, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: Big Brother And The Grim Reaper by Benjamin Ginsberg

Comprehensive. Dense. Short. Slightly Lacking Bibliography. This is an utterly fascinating look at the history and current issues involving political (and thus legal) life after death, in all kinds of different ways. Some ways you have probably heard of (Wills, Advanced Directives, etc). Other ways may be new to you, including the idea of posthumous reproduction. Everything is covered in a sort of “primer” manner – we get a broad overview, a few specific examples, a decent discussion of the overall subfield… and then we’re moving… and we’re moving. Which is to be somewhat expected given the overall brevity of the book and just how many different posthumous topics Ginsberg manages to discuss at all.

Indeed, the only weakness here is simply that at 13% bibliography, I simply expect at least a *touch* more – even, perhaps, as low as 15% (on an already expanded window that was once 20-30%).

Beyond this particular quibble, read this book – you’re going to learn a lot and have a lot to think about. I know I did and do.

Very much recommended.

This review of Big Brother And The Grim Reaper by Benjamin Ginsberg was originally written on July 5, 2024.

July 5, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: Key To The City by Sara C. Bronin

Taylor Swift != “Modern Day Elvis Presley”! I came into this book wanting to read about the American Government on the Fourth of July. Honestly, as an avowed Anarchist and former Libertarian Party official at both the State and local levels + 2x rural small town City Council candidate… I probably should have known better. 😉

It isn’t that this book isn’t illuminating nor well documented – it actually is reasonably good at both, with a bibliography clocking in at 21% of the overall text. Seriously, if you’ve never considered the topic of land zoning as it is practiced in the United States and how it is used to control you, your neighbors, your town, even to a slightly lesser (direct) manner your State and even the entire Country… you need to read this book.

Bronin truly does a great job of examining the history of zoning as practiced in the US, including how it came to be and why and how it has been used over the century or so since it first came into being. (Indeed, according to Bronin, the Supreme Court cases that effectively legalized the practice are still not quite a century old at either the writing of this review in early July 2024 or when the book is scheduled to be released in early October 2024.)

My issue, and I think it is objective enough (if, perhaps, barely) is that Bronin approaches this topic as a Chair of a Zoning Board who wants Zoning Boards to be even *more* active in limiting what you can do with the property that you legally own and actively encourages strategies to accomplish a very progressive agenda, including “Climate change” and mass transit theories that barely work in the extremely densely populated “Boshwash” (Boston – Washington DC) corridor she rules the aforementioned Zoning Board in – theories that could never work in the *far* less densely populated areas of South Georgia or even Central South Carolina that I’ve lived in, much less west of the Missisippi River where population densities (until you get to the Pacific Coast) largely truly plummet. And yes, there are *reasons* I mentioned my political background up front in this review. 🙂

As but an example, I point to the title of this review – at one point in this text, Ms. Bronin does in fact claim that Taylor Swift is a “modern day Elvis Presley”. To be clear, if she had compared Ms. Swift to say the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or even Johnny Cash himself, that would have been a fair comparison and I would have had to find another example of where she is particularly outlandish without going into the actual details of the book (ie, spoilers). But as Ms. Swift never had to so much as register for the Draft – much less be selected by it and forced to serve in the US Military, this alone shows that Elvis was a different breed entirely. And to be clear, lest any Swifties attack this review just because of this paragraph, I’m not actually criticizing Ms. Swift. She is indeed a global phenomenon and is clearly quite talented in her own right. I am not saying otherwise or taking anything from her. I’m simply noting that for all she has done and all the fans she has, Elvis was *still* on another level from her.

Overall, read this book. Seriously. You’re going to learn a lot, no matter your own political leanings or how you feel about the sanctity of private property. But “if you feel as I feel” (to quote the always amazing V for Vendetta), know there will be many points you will want to defenestrate this book forthwith and from the highest available window. But unless you’ve had the experience of myself or Ms. Bronin or the admittedly *numerous* people like us who *have* actively dealt with zoning boards at some direct level before… you really are going to learn some things here. Clearly, even *I* learned a few things here myself, even *with* a few years of directly relevant experience.

July 1, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

Interesting And Comprehensive Examination Marred By Leftist Ideology. If you can overlook (or if you like) the *frequent* bigotries against “males”, “white males”, and/ or “rich white males” and if you agree with Greta Thunberg re: “Climate” “Change” (or whatever the hell they’re calling it now as you read this review), you’re going to love this book. The star deduction comes specifically because of such slanted “reporting”. (I read the Audible version of this book and thus can’t comment on the length of its bibliography one way or another.)

If the above doesn’t apply to you, you should read this book anyway.

Because when it stays on subject about the efforts to map the seas and specifically the deepest parts of them, both cutting edge and throughout history, this book actually is quite good. Tretheway manages to show both the necessity of the effort and just how dangerous it can be in both academic and very real senses, along with all of the problems associated with having the data or not as well as gathering the data in the first place. Along the way we’re going to encounter quite a few legendary people, some truly globally famous even well outside their exploratory regions, others famous only within very narrow, sometimes quite niche, fields – but famous nonetheless. She manages to make the reader care about both the historic exploration and the current efforts, up to and including even using AI drones to get data humans otherwise can’t easily obtain. And all of this is quite remarkable indeed.

It is simply a shame that she had to integrate so much bigotry into this reporting – it truly could have been a truly remarkable work otherwise. And yet, the tale as written is still strong enough even with the integrated bigotry to still warrant a read by truly everyone remotely interested in the oceans for any reason.

June 11, 2024August 7, 2025

#BookReview: American Covenant by Yuval Levin

Dense Yet Optimistic Treatise Calls For Revival Of Long-Lost Ideals. In American political discourse, the tide turned significantly towards a more Jeffersonian approach based on liberal ideals such that most all American political discourse for quite some time now is mostly based on rights – who has them, who needs them, whose should have them, who should defend them, etc.

Here, Levin argues that this focus on Jeffersonian thoughts has led us to the current divisive era, one that threatens to tear the American nation apart.

Levin, instead, has a suggestion: the revival of Madisonian thoughts regarding *republican* ideals- somewhat (but not completely) analogous to some modern foci on pluralism, but with the added focus of making pluralism work within a functioning government. After all, it was this very tension between these two competing camps that originally allowed the nation to come together under “e pluribus unum”… and Levin has some thoughts on how that can work again.

Levin does a detailed look at the ideas, how we got to where we are, how each plays out in each realm of American polity, and how a renewed focus on republicanism could heal our divided land. It is a dense look mostly written for scholars and deep thinkers, but for those that can hang with density akin to some substance just shy of lead… this promises to be quite illuminating indeed. And it is one that more Americans *should* read than likely actually *will*.

The single star deduction here is simply due to the shorter than expected bibliography, clocking in at about 13% of the Advance Review Copy of the text I was able to read, where even in a relaxed posture on that point I would still expect around 15%. Splitting hairs at that point, perhaps, but I’ve had these standards since I began reviewing books several years ago, and it wouldn’t be fair to either this book or all the others to not hold to the same-ish standard.

Very much recommended.

This review of American Covenant by Yuval Levin was originally written on July 11, 2024.