book reviews law

Book Reviews

Will the real shareholder primacy please stand up.

• Ann M. Lipton

Unshielded: How the Police Can Become Touchable

• Brandon Hasbrouck

Before  Mine! : Indigenous Property Rights for Jagenagenon

• Angela R. Riley

Policing “Bad” Mothers

• I. Bennett Capers

“Made to Feel Broken”: Ending Conversion Practices and Saving Transgender Lives

• Jennifer Levi
• Kevin Barry

The “Common-Good” Manifesto

• William Baude & Stephen E. Sachs

Is a Science of Comparative Constitutionalism Possible?

• Madhav Khosla

Puzzles of Progressive Constitutionalism

• Jonathan S. Gould

Policing Mass Incarceration

• Fred O. Smith Jr.

What is the Law’s Role in a Recession?

• Gabriel Rauterberg
• Joshua Younger

• Harvard Library
• Research Guides
• Harvard Law School Library

Finding Book Reviews of Law-Related Books and in Legal Publications

Introduction, interesting commentary about book reviews, rss feeds from selected book review sources, legal indexes/databases, regular surveys/book reviews in law reviews/journals, other periodicals, interdisciplinary databases, political science and history, psychology and education, review publications, book reviews in general news sources, legal newspaper sources, internet resources, other media, other guides for finding book reviews.

This guide is designed as an introduction to finding book reviews, particularly in law-related areas.  It focues more on book reviews for scholars as opposed to librarians for purchase decisions.   For more sources on finding book reviews (particularly on older titles before the 1980's, see Finding Book Reviews (FAS).

This guide focuses very much on US and English-language books. For non-US books originally published in the vernacular, sometimes national bibliographies, regional studies databases, newspapers and other resources for the particular country.

• The Endangered Scholarly Book Review
• Which Law Reviews Still Publish Book Review Essays?
• The Future of Book Reviews, Predicted from the Index to Legal Periodicals?

Finding book reviews in journals

Most indexes/databases have the ability to limit to "book reviews" or "reviews."   Below are some selected databases you can use that let you limit to book reviews, usually under document type.  In general, check the advanced search functions of databases related to your discipline.

• Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1908-1981 (Law Login Required) Limit by document type "book review" more... less... This retrospective database indexes over 750 legal periodicals published in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Annual surveys of the laws of a jurisdiction, annual surveys of the federal courts, yearbooks, annual institutes, and annual reviews of the work in a given field or on a given topic will also be covered.
• Dicta-Texas Law Review
• Michigan Law Review Survey of Books
• Harvard Law Review Book Reviews
• European Journal of International Law
• JSTOR Use Advanced Search and Narrow By "Reviews" more... less... Includes all titles in the JSTOR collection, excluding recent issues. JSTOR (www.jstor.org) is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. For complete lists of titles and collections, please refer to http://www.jstor.org/about/collection.list.html.
• Academic Search Premier (Harvard Login) Limit to Document Type "Book Review" more... less... Academic Search Premier (ASP) is a multi-disciplinary database that includes citations and abstracts from over 4,700 scholarly publications (journals, magazines and newspapers). Full text is available for more than 3,600 of the publications and is searchable.
• MasterFILE Premier (EBSCOhost) Limit to Document Type "Book Review" more... less... MasterFILE Premier, designed for school and public library use, provides full text for approximately 2,000 periodicals covering a broad range of disciplines including general reference, business, education, health, general science, and multi-cultural issues. It also features Magill Book Reviews, approximately 260 reference books, including the World Almanac & Book of Facts and the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.), 88,000 brief biographies, more than 86,000 primary source documents, and an image collection of 107,000 photos, maps and flags.
• Web of Science Book Citation Index (Social Sciences) Covers 2005 onward. Science is also available.
• Readers' Guide Retrospective (1890-1982) 1890-1982; select document type "book review" more... less... http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:holliswb
• Hollis+ Once you run a search, you may limit resource type to Reviews.
• IBSS: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (CSA) Limit to document type "review" more... less... An online bibliographic database that provides access to over 2.5 million records relating to four core social science subjects: anthropology, economics, politics and sociology.
• ProQuest Databases Search across all ProQuest databases. Check off review as document type.
• IBR - Internationale Bibliographie der Rezension more... less... The International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences (IBR) published since 1971 provides an interdisciplinary, international bibliography of reviews. The database indexes thousands of scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, primarily from Europe and North America.
• PCI - SEE: Periodicals Index Online
• America: History and Life (ABC-CLIO) Check Book Reviews under Publication Type more... less... America: History and Life is the primary bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present, covering over 2,000 journals published worldwide. In addition to all key English-language historical journals, America: History and Life coverage includes selected historical journals from major countries, state, and local history journals, and a targeted selection of journals in the social sciences and humanities. In addition to articles, the database includes book and media reviews and citations to abstracts of dissertations.
• PsychCritiques

Selected review publications

• London Review of Books From 1979-
• New York Review of Books 1963-
• Times Literary Supplement
• Kirkus Reviews
• Publishers Weekly
• The New Rambler
• Law and Politics Books
• H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• IBR: International Bibliographie der Rezension The International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences (IBR) published since 1971 provides an interdisciplinary, international bibliography of reviews. The database indexes thousands of scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, primarily from Europe and North America.

News sources, blogs and Internet generally

• LexisAdvance Narrow by category "News"
• Newspaper and news collections (selected by HLSL)
• News Databases (through university)
• Google News
• New York Times Book Review (web) Access back to 1997. For HLS affiliates, sign up for the law school's Group Pass .
• Washington Post Search through Factiva
• Washington Post Book World Free registration required
• The Economist
• Financial Times
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• The New Statesman
• The Telegraph
• Quill and Quire
• The Globe and Mail
• Wall Street Journal
• Huffington Post
• Google Custom Search of Book Reviews
• ARD-The Anthropology Review Database
• Weyrich Consulting Services: Law and Legal Book Reviews
• Just Books NYU Law School's Brennan Center for Justice
• Global Law Book Reviews
• European Law Book Reviews
• Law and Politics Book Review
• Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews
• Legal History Blog
• Law Professors Blog Network
• Justia's Blawg Search
• Legal Theory Bookworm

Amazon often includes excerpts from book reviews, as well as user-contributed reviews.

Other guides

• Book Reviews: A Finding Guide (Cornell)
• Book Reviews (Virginia Tech) good explanation of types of reviews
• Finding Book Reviews (Harvard-FAS) Particularly useful for finding older book reviews and reviews of books in other disciplines.
• Last Updated: Apr 12, 2024 4:50 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/lawbookreviews

Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy

Law and Politics Book Review

Sponsored by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.

• Submit a Book for Consideration

RATIONING THE CONSTITUTION: HOW JUDICIAL CAPACITY SHAPES SUPREME COURT DECISION-MAKING

THE IMAGINED JUROR: HOW HYPOTHETICAL JURIES INFLUENCE FEDERAL PROSECUTORS

ACTUAL MALICE: CIVIL RIGHTS AND FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN NEW YORK TIMES V. SULLIVAN

DIVERSIFYING THE COURTS: RACE, GENDER, AND JUDICIAL LEGITIMACY

HIGH COURTS IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: EVIDENCE, METHODOLOGIES, AND FINDINGS

Prisons as Laboratories of Antidemocracy

Jeffrey Bellin's  Mass Incarceration Nation  robustly analyzes how state and federal policies have combined to drive up prison populations. Mass incarceration represents a failure of democracy, but the repressive policies of American prisons represent an even graver threat as laboratories of antidemoc…

What We Ask of Law

This Book Review asks what comprises a well-functioning legal system in light of new evidence of how law operated across a wide historical panorama. Such contextualization has implications for a sound working definition of law, understanding law’s relation to the rule of law, and law’s role in emanc…

Rights, Structure, and Remediation

In  The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies , Aziz Huq contends federal courts exacerbate societal inequities by overzealously enforcing constitutional limits on government regulation while neglecting individual-rights violations. Though some of Huq’s criticisms are spot-on, others are overstated, and…

Capitalist Development, Labor Law, and the New Working Class

Gabriel Winant’s  The Next Shift  charts the transformation of Pittsburgh’s political economy from World War II through 2008. This Review suggests that the long-term process of capitalist development—which is central to Winant’s account—also helped to reshape our labor law over the same period. 

Unwritten Law and the Odd Ones Out

In a new book, Douglas Baird argues that the values of reorganization professionals, more than statute or case law, define the norms of corporate bankruptcy. This Book Review shows how rule-by-reorganizers can explain Chapter 11's troubling tendency to disregard the interests of legacy creditors.  

Writing About the Past That Made Us: Scholars, Civic Culture, and the American Present and Future

This Review assesses the arguments made in Akhil Amar’s  The Words That Made Us about the impoverished nature of our current discourse on our constitutional system of government.

(Re)Framing Race in Civil Rights Lawyering

This Review examines the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s new book,  Stony the Road:  Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow , for the study of racism in our nation’s legal system and for the regulation of race in the legal profession.

Reevaluating Legal Theory

Law is a social practice that pursues a moral purpose. Analyzing Professor Julie Dickson’s  Evaluation and Legal Theory , this Review brings the natural-law tradition into conversation with contemporary philosophy of social science to seek an approach to general jurisprudence that respects both the fa…

Truer U.S. History: Race, Borders, and Status Manipulation

Daniel Immerwahr’s  How to Hide an Empire  rewrites U.S. history with empire at the core. Building on that accomplishment, this Review sketches a U.S. legal history of indigeneity, race, slavery, immigration, and empire in which legal “status manipulation” accomplished and hid the myriad wrongs done.

Examining the Case for Socialized Law

I n Equal Justice: Fair Legal Systems in an Unfair World , Frederick Wilmot-Smith argues that it is only by deprivatizing markets for legal services that we can ever hope to achieve equal justice. This Book Review explains why his bold prescription is worthy of serious examination and critical debate. …

The Law of Informational Capitalism

Informational capitalism brings new dangers of surveillance and manipulation—but also of accelerating monopoly, inequality, and democratic disempowerment. Examining two important new books on the topic, this Review maps the law and political economy of informational capitalism, a domain of rising pr…

Fidelity and Construction

Lawrence Lessig’s Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution makes an important contribution to “New Originalism.” This Review explores how Lessig’s theory of fidelity to role can inform an originalist understanding of constitutional construction.

The Politics of Decarceration

Can the political process help undo mass incarceration? This  Book  Review argues that changes in the two major political parties, the results of recent state-level elections, and changes in public opinion all provide reason to hope that democratic politics is compatible with ending mass incarceration…

Equality of Opportunity and the Schoolhouse Gate

Cases involving schools have implicated nearly every major civil right. In this Review of Justin Driver’s The Schoolhouse Gate, however, Professors Michelle Adams and Derek Black demonstrate that the right to equal educational opportunity is the tie that binds together the Supreme Court’s many dispa…

The High Stakes of Low-Level Criminal Justice

Alexandra Natapoff reviews Misdemeanorland , summarizing the book’s key contributions and extending its insights about New York City’s system of misdemeanor managerial social control to illuminate the broader dynamics and democratic significance of the U.S. misdemeanor process.

State Courts and Constitutional Structure

Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court reviews Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s new book,   51 Imperfect Solutions: The Making of American Constitutional Law.

The New Jim Crow Is the Old Jim Crow

A vast divide exists in the national imagination between the racial struggles of the civil rights era and those of the present. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Gillespie McRae and Jeanne Theoharis, this Review argues that complexifying this oversimplified history is critical to contemporary racial …

Who Locked Us Up? Examining the Social Meaning of Black Punitiveness

In this Review of James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America , Darren Hutchinson reconciles Forman’s research with antiracist accounts of U.S. crime policy. Literature on implicit bias, social dominance orientation, and right-wing authoritaria…

Brief Lives

In this Review of Owen Fiss’s book,  Pillars of Justice: Lawyers and the Liberal Tradition , Laura Kalman explores Fiss's views on the legal figures appearing in the book. In addition, Kalman discusses the criticisms of  Brown v. Board of Education  and legal liberalism that are missing in Fiss’s accoun…

Pregnancy, Poverty, and the State

In this Review of Khiara Bridges’s book,  The Poverty of Privacy Rights , Michele Goodwin and Erwin Chemerinsky argue that state legislatures, as well as the federal government and courts, express moral disregard and even outright contempt for poor women in multitudinous ways that include, but extend …

How Long Is History’s Shadow?

Josh Chafetz, in  Congress’s Constitution , urges Congress to rehabilitate its underused but important nonlegislative powers. In this Book Review, Anita Krishnakumar argues that while reinvigorating these powers is a good idea in theory, Congress may not have the ability or inclination to do so. 

The Original Theory of Constitutionalism

The conflict between various versions of “originalism” and “living constitutionalism” has long defined the landscape of constitutional theory and practice. In this Review of Richard Tuck’s The Sleeping Sovereign , David Grewal and Jedediah Purdy adapt the sovereignty-government distinction at the hea…

Privacy’s Trust Gap: A Review

Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest By Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum Cambridge and London: The MIT Press 2015 author. Neil Richards is Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law; Affiliate Scholar, The Center for Internet…

Systemic Triage: Implicit Racial Bias in the Criminal Courtroom

Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court By Nicole van cleve Stanford university press, april 2016 author. Professor of Law, U.C. Irvine School of Law. A.B. Harvard College, J.D. Yale Law School. I wish to thank Rick Banks, Erwin Chemerins…

The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities BY STEPHEN BREYER, ALFRED A. KNOPF, 2015 author. Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Will Baude and Curt Bradley for helpful comments, Kathrine Gutierrez f…

Eighteen Years On: A Re-Review

The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment BY WILLIAM N. ESKRIDGE, JR. NEW YORK: THE FREE PRESS, 1996. author. Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School. In 1992 I published a book called…

The Banality of Racial Inequality

Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage BY DARIA ROITHMAYR NEW YORK: NYU PRESS, 2014, PP. 205. $25.00. author. Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Professor (Adjunct) of Law at Yale Law School. I…

Constitutions of Hope and Fear

Citizens Divided: Campaign Finance Reform and the Constitution BY ROBERT C. POST CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014, PP. 264. $29.95. author. David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia. I am gra…

Judging Justice on Appeal

A review of  Injustice on Appeal: The United States Courts of Appeals in Crisis

Why Protect Religious Freedom?

Why Tolerate Religion? BY BRIAN LEITER PRINCETON, NJ: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012, PP. 208. $24.95. author. Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. The auth…

Next-Generation Civil Rights Lawyers: Race and Representation in the Age of Identity Performance

122 Yale L.J. 1484 (2013). This Book Review addresses two important new books, Professor Kenneth Mack’s Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer and Professors Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America , and utilizes their insights to bo…

Lightning in the Hand: Indians and Voting Rights

120 Yale L.J. 1420 (2011). 

American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights

By Laughlin McDonald

Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010, pp. 347. $55.00.

The Common School Before and After Brown: Democracy, Equality, and the Productivity Agenda

120 Yale L.J. 1455 (2011). 

In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark

By Martha Minow

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 320. $24.95.

Multiplicity in Federalism and the Separation of Powers

120 Yale L.J. 1084 (2011). 

The Ideological Origins of American Federalism

By Allison L. Lacroix

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19th ed., 2010, PP. 312. $35.00.

The Bluebook Blues

120 Yale L.J. 850 (2011). 

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation

By the Columbia Law Review , the Harvard Law Review , the University of Pennsylvania Law Review , and The Yale Law Journal

The Best Laid Plans

120 Yale L.J. 586 (2010). 

Unbundling Homeownership: Regional Reforms from the Inside Out

119 Yale L.J. 1904 (2010). 

Integrity and the Incongruities of Justice: A Review of Daniel Markovits's A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Democracy in a Democratic Age

119 Yale L.J. 1948 (2010). 

Contract Interpretation Redux

119 Yale L.J. 926 (2010). 

Contract interpretation remains the largest single source of contract litigation between business firms. In part this is because contract interpretation issues are difficult, but it also reflects a deep divide between textualist and contextualist theories of interpretatio…

Debunking Blackstonian Copyright

118 Yale L.J. 1126 (2009).

Copyright’s Paradox

BY NEIL WEINSTOCK NETANEL NEW YORK , NY: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008, PP.ix, 274. $34.95.

From Litigation, Legislation:A Review of Brian Landsberg’s Free at Last To Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

117 Yale L.J. 1132 (2008).

Giving the Constitution to the Courts

117 Yale L.J. 886 (2008).

Wealth Without Markets?

116 Yale L.J. 1472 (2007)  

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

BY YOCHAI BENKLER

NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006. PP. 528. $40.00

Cosmopolitan Law?

116 Yale L.J. 1022 (2007)

Restoring the Right Constitution?

116  Yale L.J.  732 (2007)

Save the Cities, Stop the Suburbs?

116 Yale L.J. 598 (2006) Sprawl: A Compact History BY ROBERT BRUEGMANN CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2005. PP. 306. $27.50 The City: A Global History BY JOEL KOTKIN NEW YORK: MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES, 2005. PP. 256. $21.95

The Pragmatic Passion of Stephen Breyer

115 Yale L.J. 1675 (2006) Now in his twelfth year as a Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Breyer has written an important book, Active Liberty , which crystallizes a fundamental set of beliefs about the American Constitution and his role as a Justice. Taking Active Liberty as the entry point, this piece p…

Justice Breyer Throws Down the Gauntlet

115 Yale L.J. 1699 (2006) A Supreme Court Justice writing a book about constitutional law is like a dog walking on his hind legs: The wonder is not that it is done well but that it is done at all. The dog's walking is inhibited by anatomical limitations, the Justice's writing by political ones. Supre…

Justice Breyer's Democratic Pragmatism

115 Yale L.J. 1719 (2006) As a law professor at Harvard Law School, Stephen Breyer specialized in administrative law. His important work in that field was marked above all by its unmistakably pragmatic foundations. In an influential book, Breyer emphasized that regulatory problems were "mismatched" t…

Viewing CSI and the Threshold of Guilt: Managing Truth and Justice in Reality and Fiction

The " CSI effect" is a term that legal authorities and the mass media have coined to describe a supposed influence that watching the television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has on juror behavior. Some have claimed that jurors who see the high-quality forensic evidence presented on CSI raise th…

Who Will Find the Defendant if He Stays with His Sheep? Justice in Rural China

114 Yale L.J. 1675 (2005) In Song fa xiaxiang: Zhongguo jiceng sifazhidu yanjiu [ Sending Law to the Countryside: Research on China's Basic-Level Judicial System ], Dean Zhu Suli of Beijing University Law School claims that Chinese legal scholars uncritically accept foreign models and rule-of-law ideol…

Property in All the Wrong Places?

114 Yale L.J. 991 (2005) In Who Owns Native Culture? and Public Lands and Political Meaning , an anthropologist and a historian document an ever-increasing deployment of property categories in two quite different domains: native people's recent cultural claims in the first book and the longer story o…

Judicial Power and Civil Rights Reconsidered

114 Yale L.J. 593 (2004) Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on both the history of the civil rights struggle and judicial power more generally. Klarman argues that for much of…

The Law and Economics of Critical Race Theory

112 Yale L.J. 1757 (2003) Our story is about the production and consumption of racial prototypes. The regulatory thrust of homogeneity creates both a demand for, and a supply of, specific racial prototypes--outsiders who can fit within predominantly white workplace cultures without "disturb[ing] the …

The Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation

112 Yale L.J. 1829 (2003) Why do corporate governance systems differ quite substantially around the world? The American model supervises managers through a board representing a diffuse mass of external shareholders whose rights are defended by a variety of institutional rules (such as those governing…

The Grounds of Welfare

112 Yale L.J. 1511 (2003) Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell are talented and distinguished legal academics who for the past several years have been working jointly on a massive project in normative law and economics. The project's goal is to answer the question: What are the criteria by which legal pol…

What Ails Us?

112 Yale L.J. 1135 (2003) Is American democracy sick? If so, what ails it? More importantly, can the disease be cured? Can its symptoms be alleviated by imaginative and well-crafted laws? Or is it a genetic disorder embedded in the DNA of modern representative government and thus unlikely to yield to…

Friedman's Law

112 Yale L.J. 925 (2003) In this appraisal of Lawrence M. Friedman's American Law in the Twentieth Century, I begin in Part I with a survey of the several "schools" of American legal history that have risen to prominence in the years since World War II, utilizing a suggestive framework first offered …

112 Yale L.J. 617 (2002) In this important new book on local governance, economist William Fischel presents and defends a deceptively simple and intuitively resonant proposition: "that homeowners, who are the most numerous and politically influential group within most localities, are guided by their …

Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal

111 Yale L.J. 2195 (2002)

Method and Principle in Legal Theory

111 Yale L.J. 1757 (2002) The Practice of Principle is an excellent book that practically overflows with interesting and original arguments. Coleman is a superb analytical philosopher, as every page of the book attests. This is one of the most important contributions to legal theory to come along in …

Why Tax the Rich? Efficiency, Equity, and Progressive Taxation

111 Yale L.J. 1391 (2002) In Greek mythology, Atlas was a giant who carried the world on his shoulders. In Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Atlas represents the "prime movers"--the talented few who bear the weight of the world's economy. In the novel, the prime movers go on strike against the o…

Tobacco Unregulated: Why the FDA Failed, and What To Do Now

111 Yale L.J. 1179 (2002) The book jacket promises drama. David Kessler, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is said to tell "a gripping detective story," a story of "right and wrong" and "moral courage." The "unlikely heroes" are a small team of FDA employees who set out t…

Dialectics and Domestic Abuse

110 Yale L.J. 1459 (2001)  

Erie and the History of the One True Federalism

110 Yale L.J. 829 (2001)

Signaling Discount Rates: Law, Norms, and Economic Methodology

110 Yale L.J. 625 (2001) For decades, sociologists and law-and-society scholars have studied law in a broader social context that includes norms. More recently, the subject of social norms has come to the sustained attention of rational choice scholars, including economists, philosophers, politica…

Animal Rights

110 Yale L.J. 527 (2000) The "animal rights" movement is gathering steam, and Steven Wise is one of the pistons. A lawyer whose practice is the protection of animals, he has now written a book in which he urges courts in the exercise of their common-law powers of legal rulemaking to confer legally en…

Corruption, Pollution, and Politics

110 Yale L.J. 293 (2000)  

Volume 133’s Emerging Scholar of the Year: Robyn Powell

Announcing the eighth annual student essay competition, announcing the ylj academic summer grants program, featured content, lock them™ up: holding transnational corporate human-rights abusers accountable, administrative law at a turning point, law and movements: clinical perspectives.

Home > Law Faculty Scholarship > Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The DC@UB Law Faculty Book Review collection includes book reviews published by all current and emeritus University at Buffalo School of Law faculty members in law reviews, interdisciplinary journals, and online publications. The full text or a link to freely-available full text is included wherever possible.

Submissions from 2023 2023

Speaking for the Dying: Life-and-Death Decisions in Intensive Care by Susan Shapiro , David M. Engel

The Burdens of Love and Time , Paul Linden-Retek

Submissions from 2022 2022

A Post Minimum Contacts World , Christine P. Bartholomew

Refashioning Old Tools for Modern Society , Christine P. Bartholomew

Can Liberal Constitutionalism Survive the Rise of the Megacity? , James A. Gardner

Europe and the Federal Conceit , Paul Linden-Retek

Submissions from 2021 2021

The Reality of Class-Action Appeals , Christine P. Bartholomew

Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature and Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism , Guyora Binder

Review of Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law, edited by Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester, and Virginia Mantouvalou , Matthew Dimick

Seth Donnelly's The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation , Matthew Dimick

Bruce A. Kimball and Daniel R. Coquillete's The Intellectual Sword – Harvard Law School, the Second Century , John Henry Schlegel

Susan Bartie, Free Hands and Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars , John Henry Schlegel

Edward A. Purcell, Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism: The Historical Significance of a Judicial Icon , Matthew J. Steilen

Submissions from 2020 2020

Lawrence Friedman's Crime Without Punishment: Aspects of the History of Homicide , Guyora Binder

Social Planning in a Physical World , Joel E. Black and Ruth L. Steiner

Submissions from 2019 2019

William Beinart, Peter Delius and Michelle Hay, Rights to Land: a guide to tenure upgrading and restitution in South Africa (book review) , Mekkonen Firew Ayano

New Frontiers in Empirical Labour Law Research, Edited by Amy Ludlow and Alysia Blackham , Matthew Dimick

The Anthropology of Religion and Law , Rebecca Redwood French

Richard Moorhead, Steven Vaughan, and Cristina Godinho: In‐House Lawyers’ Ethics: Institutional Logics, Legal Risk and the Tournament of Influence , Lynn M. Mather

Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status of the Individual in International Law. By Anne Peters. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. pp. xxxv, 602. Index , Tara J. Melish

Submissions from 2018 2018

What Don’t You Know and How Will You Learn It? , Elizabeth G. Adelman

The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America . By Sarah Igo , Samantha Barbas

Planning for the Social City? , Joel E. Black

Francesco Palermo & Karl Kössler's Comparative Federalism: Constitutional Arrangements and Case Law (book review) , James A. Gardner

A History of Law and Lawyers in the GATT/WTO. Edited by Gabrielle Marceau. , Meredith Kolsky Lewis

City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance , John Henry Schlegel

Submissions from 2017 2017

Toward a Universal Understanding of the Value of Legal Research Education , Elizabeth G. Adelman

Susanna Blumenthal's Law and the Modern Mind , Guyora Binder

United States Migrant Interdiction and the Detention of Refugees in Guantánamo Bay , John Harland Giammatteo

The Paradigm Sways: Macroeconomics Turns to History (reviewing three titles) , David A. Westbrook

Submissions from 2016 2016

Ian Harper, Tobias Kelly & Akshay Khanna's The Clinic and the Court: Law, Medicine, and Elizabeth Mertz, Anthropology & The Role of Social Science in Law (review essay) , Anya Bernstein

After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship, edited by Robert Leckey , Michael Boucai

Pet Subjects (reviewing Jessica Pierce, Run, Spot, Run (2016)) , Irus Braverman

Wild Life: An Ethnography [Author's Response to Reviews] , Irus Braverman

Zootopia (reviewing David Grazian, American Zoo (2015)) , Irus Braverman

Kathleen Thelen's Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity , Matthew Dimick

Herbert Hovenkamp. The Opening of American Law: Neoclassical Legal Thought, 1870–1970. , John Henry Schlegel

On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century, by Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball , John Henry Schlegel

Submissions from 2015 2015

The Open Access Advantage in Legal Education’s Age of Assessment , Elizabeth G. Adelman

Submissions from 2014 2014

Child Labor in America: A History by Chaim M. Rosenberg , Joel E. Black

Vicki Eaklor's Queer America: A People's History of the United States (book review) , Michael Boucai

Review of Constitutional Dynamics in Federal Systems: Sub-National Perspectives, edited by Michael Burgess and G. Alan Tarr , James A. Gardner

Review of Federal Dynamics: Continuity, Change, and the Varieties of Federalism, Arthur Benz and Jorg Broscheck, eds. (2013) , James A. Gardner

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BOOK REVIEW

Hrafn Asgeirsson: The Nature and Value of Vagueness in the Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020), pp. 203

• Published: 18 June 2021
• Volume 40 , pages 463–469, ( 2021 )

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• Joshua Pike   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2510-0791 1  

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Mark Greenberg, “The Standard Picture and Its Discontents” in Leslie Green and Brian Leiter (eds.) Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 39–106.

Ibid , p. 76.

See, for example, Nicos Stavropoulos, “Words and Obligations” in Andrea Dolcetti, Luís Duarte d’Almeida and James Edwards (eds.) Reading HLA Hart’s The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 123–153: ‘For any consideration, including the content of the language of a statute, something must assign it some role in the explanation of its impact on obligation … There is a variety of considerations, linguistic and other, which compete as candidates for a role in the fundamental explanation of [that] impact … and assigning any of these some such role seems to require appeal to considerations of political morality’ (p. 153).

Joseph Raz, Between Authority and Interpretation: On the Theory of Law and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) pp. 111–112.

John Gardner, Law as a Leap of Faith: Essays on Law in General (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) pp. 149–150.

Ibid , p. 150.

Greenberg describes the point as ‘obvious’, taking it to be ‘fundamental to the nature of morality that if, all-things-considered, one is morally required to take some action, it cannot be the case that other reasons make it permissible not to take the action’: Greenberg, “The Standard Picture and Its Discontents”, p. 82.

Ibid , p. 101.

As Endicott argues: Timothy Endicott, “The Value of Vagueness” in Andrei Marmor and Scott Soames (eds.) Philosophical Foundations of Language in the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 14–30.

Roy Sorensen, “Vagueness Has No Function in Law”, 7 Legal Theory 385 (2001).

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Orwell's Arresting Ambiguities

D. J. Taylor judiciously steers a course between hagiography and debunking.

George Orwell said that Charles Dickens was an author well worth stealing, which is to say, attaching to one’s cause whatever it might be. If you can say “Dickens would have thought likewise,” you are claiming the approval not only of a genius, but of a man of deeply generous and humane nature (never mind any squalid revelations about his actual biography).

George Orwell has suffered something of the same fate: thanks to a kind of secular beatification, everyone wants to claim him. He is, so to speak, the voice of unvarnished truth in a world of prevailing untruth. Like George Washington, he could not tell a lie.

The problem with such beatification is that it easily provokes an equal and opposite effort at debunking, which is as unrealistic as the process of beatification itself. It sometimes seems as if feet of clay are the modern biographer’s favourite feature of whoever their subject may be. But in this brief but not shallow, well-written, and entertaining guide to the life and work of George Orwell, D. J. Taylor, who has written not one but two biographies of Orwell (no accumulation of evidence about so prolific and protean an author can ever be final), judiciously steers between hagiography and debunking. His Orwell is a complex man, tormented and conflicted to some degree but also, overall, admirable. The fact that Orwell was not all of a piece and contained contradictions within himself is what lends depth to his work. There may be better books about Orwell than this, but if so I do not know them. 

Taylor, whose knowledge of both the life and work of Orwell is clearly profound, draws them seamlessly together so that they are mutually enlightening. This is, in my opinion, literary criticism as it ought to be. Completely free of the disfiguring jargon or ideology that makes so much academic criticism completely incomprehensible, unreadable, or not worth the effort of reading, Taylor’s book encourages its reader to return to Orwell’s books, or to read them for the first time. He convincingly treats his books prior to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as interesting and worthwhile in themselves, and not merely as teleological stepping-stones to the two books that almost everyone knows who reads anything at all. 

This last claim, incidentally, is of the type that Orwell made his own, of which Taylor gives several examples in his chapter on one of Orwell’s obsessions, prose style (Taylor’s book is cleverly organised both thematically and biographically, so that you cannot say which is uppermost). Thus Orwell wrote “If you want to know what a dead man’s relatives think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone” and “Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist.” These ex cathedra observations are not meant to be the conclusion of a Pew-type survey in which, for example, a representative sample of intelligent sixteen-year-old boys has been canvassed for their opinions. They are, rather, statements that are part poetic, part philosophical, part abstract, and part empirical in nature, without being truths in the most absolute and literal sense. Orwell paid his readers the compliment of assuming that they would understand this, and indeed may have been instrumental in helping them to do so. 

Orwell was as much a romantic conservative as a socialist radical, his occasional lapses into blood-curdling revolutionism notwithstanding.

Writing about Orwell’s subject matter in such a way that every last statement was backed up by a panoply of statistical evidence would be intolerably dull and would not necessarily be more accurate as a result. Intuition as well as data is necessary, though of course relying too much on the former carries the risk of merely confirming one’s prejudices. Judgment is what is necessary, and Orwell often, though not always, had it. Incidentally, to say that every intelligent sixteen-year-old boy is a socialist is not necessarily unreserved praise of socialism, though Orwell meant it as such, to imply that socialism was merely a matter of common sense.

Occasionally Taylor, whose own judgment is pretty good, misses something important. For example, he describes the effect that Orwell’s time in Spain had on him:

Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work. 

Orwell told the general litterateur, Cyril Connolly, who had been with him at Eton, that he had seen “wonderful things” in Barcelona, then a revolutionary city in the control of the Trotskyist POUM . Taylor continues:

It was, he declared, “the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.” Churches were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Shops and cafes bore inscriptions saying that they had been collectivised. Tipping was forbidden by law, all private motor cars had been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis had been painted in the anarchist colours of red and black. “In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.”

Everyone dressed the same too, in drab overalls, Maoist avant la lettre .

Barcelona, then, was a Catalonian Pyongyang: and it is important to recall that Orwell approved of it. At this stage of his development, he was an enthusiastic totalitarian, and the shallowness of his belief that such uniformity was a triumph for freedom and equality is rather startling in a man who, a very few years later, was to be the greatest literary scourge of totalitarianism in the world. It was all to the credit of Orwell that he changed his opinion of totalitarianism so diametrically, but had he died just after the publication of Homage to Catalonia , not living long enough to write his anti-totalitarian masterpieces, he would have been remembered, if he was remembered at all, as a literary forerunner and praise-singer of some of the worst features of communist regimes. It had to be remembered too that his underlying objection to Stalin’s policy in Spain was that it was not revolutionary enough, that he promoted the Popular Front, albeit as a mere tactic, rather than the immediate revolution, à la Barcelona, as Orwell would have liked.

There is another important omission that occurs in the discussion of Orwell’s somewhat po-faced essay on boy’s weeklies, in which he severely criticised the work of Frank Richards (whose real name was Charles Hamilton, and who probably wrote more words than any other man in history, up to 30,000 a day, highly stylised as they were). Richards invented a character, Billy Bunter, a fat, lazy, boastful, stupid, greedy schoolboy whom generations of English children came to love not despite, but because of, his vices—an important moral lesson, one might have thought. Orwell attacked Richards’ work on political grounds, since Bunter attended a fictional private school, Greyfriars, a kind of which most of Richards’ readers could have had no experience. Orwell thought that this was reactionary, in effect a prop to the unjust status quo. 

He probably imagined that Richards was just a hack, but in fact, Richards was an ardent classicist who read Horace for pleasure, and he proved a formidable controversialist who got much the better of Orwell in his reply to the article. In this instance, Orwell had picked an argument that he could not win. 

But of course, it is no criticism of a relatively short book like this that it does not say all that it might have said. What is so admirable in it is the author’s ability to descry threads running through Orwell’s books that speak to his character. Orwell was as much a romantic conservative as a socialist radical, his occasional lapses into blood-curdling revolutionism notwithstanding (as late as 1941, in The Lion and the Unicorn , he wrote that it might be necessary to shoot a few reactionaries in order to establish a new socialist order in England, apparently not realising how quickly in such circumstances a few become many). 

Taylor brings out very well the ambiguities in Orwell’s thought and, especially, in his emotions. He was almost a golden ageist with respect to the Edwardian era (in which he had his early childhood), and if he had lived at a different time, he might well have been a writer such as Gilbert White who wrote The Natural History of Selbourne . He had a real knowledge of, and feeling for, natural history: his essay on the common toad is a small masterpiece. Although Orwell thought that A. E. Housman’s poems were “tinkling” (a judgment I think mistaken), the sentiment expressed by Housman in the mouth of a twenty-year-old boy in A Shropshire Lad could very much have been his:

And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. 

Orwell did not have fifty years to live, let alone seventy. Perhaps for the good of his subsequent reputation, he died at the very acme of his career, having just completed an undoubted masterpiece that, notwithstanding the implosion of the Soviet Union, remains, alas, of strong current resonance. 

I recommend this book unreservedly. It deals most sensitively with Orwell’s multiple ambiguities without trying to fit them into a Procrustean bed. It informs, enlightens, and entertains. It restores one’s faith in the value of criticism.

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Dr. ashwani kumar, senior advocate  .

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Dr.prema e & ragul ov  .

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2024 Berkeley Law Library Summer Reading List

Photo credit: Hildreth Wilson

Advice from the good doctor: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

Thanks all. Enjoy. Have a fun and relaxing summer!

Berkeley Law Library

Click on book cover to read review.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Mel eisenberg, jesse h. choper professor of law (emeritus).

From Amazon: “Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, co authoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.

Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.”

Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World by Claire Jean Kim

Jonathan glater, professor of law, associate dean, j.d. curriculum and teaching, faculty director of the center for consumer law & economic justice.

Uplifting this book is not, but it is an insightful, clear, and persuasively written chronicle of the experiences of African American experience in society and in law and that of Asian Americans in society and in law. The core argument I think of as moving relative positions of different racial (and at times ethnic) groups from two-dimensional space, representing these two groups along a line reflecting increasing degrees of power, wealth, and influence, into three-dimensional space, reflecting that Asian Americans face and have faced discrimination and worse in the United States, reflecting their distance from Whiteness, and at the same time they benefit from distance from Blackness. The carefully precise descriptions, often of the facts and judicial opinions included in a 1L Constitutional Law casebook, note the ways in which arguments that work to advance the interests of one racial or ethnic group use the prospect of Black advancement as an incentive or sometimes a threat: proposals for reparations for the imprisonment of people of Japanese descent during World War II had to overcome concern that descendants of slaves might then successfully demand reparations, too, for example. Professor Kim's ( she is on the faculty at UCI ) juxtaposition of different historical moments involving demands for fairness is provocative - even though many of the examples cannot but demoralize.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

Michael lindsey, director of library web development.

By the 1810s, generations of weavers in and around Nottingham (yes, that Nottingham) had built a reputation for quality textile work. Then they started getting rolled by factory bosses who realized they could increase their profits by installing machines, cutting jobs and lowering wages.

Lo, working families and communities suffered. The machine textiles were crappy. Representatives in government were uninterested. So, some of the workers decided to send the bosses a message by busting the machines. They were decentralized and worked in secret. They created a persona, Ned Ludd, as their captain, for their public campaign. They were local heroes.

The Luddites were not anti-technology. This dull cliché limps ever onward, even today. Rather, the Luddite's targets were "machines harmful to commonality." They only destroyed the machines that were implicated in the problem. Other modern machines were left untouched.

They took direct action in a local bounded system--weaving in Nottinghamshire in the 1810s. The reader might wonder what, if any, contemporary technologies (e.g. in a global internet system) are "harmful to commonality"? And what kind of collective action, if any, could possibly be effective?

Listen to an interview with the author on the excellent Techtonic radio program with Mark Hurst on WFMU.

The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent by Ann Jacobus (YA)

Annette counts, librarian, bishop o’dowd high school.

This book does double duty as a compelling Young Adult novel and an effective public service announcement.

True to YA form, The Coldest Winter features crossed wires, love interests, self doubt, mess ups, and humor along with a range of teen friends and a few wise adults. Del, the young narrator, is a keen observer with a self-deprecating sense of humor, and local readers will appreciate the descriptions of San Francisco and Berkeley - especially the Cal campus.

Del’s story alone would carry the novel, but Jacobus’s straightforward approach to addiction, suicide ideation, anxiety and depression make the novel more than a good story. The book opens with Del, a recently graduated high school senior, doing her volunteer shift at the crisis hotline. As Del goes through the process of handling a call, the reader sees behind the scenes and how the crisis lines offer help to those seeking connection as well as the limitations placed on front line mental health care.

Throughout the novel, Del works hard to maintain her mental health, and she shares the step-by-step techniques she uses when she senses a panic attack. We also meet the members of AA who look out for Del and counsel her when she feels overwhelmed by the urge to drink. None of this comes across as preachy or heavy handed. Instead, the vital information is incorporated seamlessly in Del’s story.

The most moving part of The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent comes when Del must deal with her beloved Aunt Fran’s grim cancer prognosis. Trust me this is not just a pile on of tragedy, but rather an opportunity for Del to grow and for the reader to learn. The hospice nurse, another well-drawn character, guides Del through Fran’s dying process, leaving the reader informed and in awe about the privilege of accompanying someone through the end of life.

Read The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent for Del’s engaging story and local setting, but most likely the book’s messages about life, death and mental health will be what sticks with you.

Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

Joe cera, data and digital initiatives librarian.

This was an all around excellent book. Are you a person who thinks numbers don't lie? Or perhaps you are in the camp that thinks that cleaned data and the computers who use data are neutral? Well, you are in for some disappointment.

Not only does it dive into many of the ways that we should rethink the way we look at data, it also sets a solid standard for how we should write about data. This book embraces the idea that the context in which data gets gathered, the people who gather data, and all of the actions around the creation of a data set are all things that matter. The idea that we shouldn't use data to make a point and that people should make their own conclusions after looking at a 'neutral' representation of the data? Nonsense. It was an excellent sign that the authors both start the book by describing themselves and their lived experiences in order to place everything that follows in context. If you have seen the term 'data feminism' out in the wild and you aren't sure what that means, you should already be looking to see where you can pick up this book. The seven principles of data feminism are ones that should invade your space and make you think any time you are creating or using data:

• Examine power
• Challenge power
• Elevate emotion and embodiment
• Rethink binaries and hierarchies
• Embrace pluralism
• Consider context
• Make labor visible

I don't want to spoil it because you should just read it (or listen to the audiobook). It is worth your time and your views surrounding data will be better for it.

Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear by Robin Wasley (YA)

Xingyue zoea, age 11.

Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear focuses on the main character, Sid Spencer’s story line. Sid has grown up as one of four Asians in her small town, Wellsie. Wellsie is a fault line, a place that has magic sealed inside it---until someone kills one of the Guardians protecting the magic. Meanwhile, she’s getting over being turned down by a boy she’s liked for years---and then her best friend starts dating him. But then one day, she feels a large earthquake. Not unusual for her area, she is not surprised. Not until she loses reception. When she goes outside, she sees someone she knows from her school. But something is wrong with him: He was the first Guardian to die.

I enjoyed this story thanks to its relatable characters. I found it easy to put myself into Sid’s point of view since she was always pretty ordinary until she was thrown into this crazy situation. If you like supernatural action novels, this is the book for you.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Monique j macaulay, acquisitions.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses; support of ecofeminism, organized labor, and leftism; and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism and capitalism. She is not, however, Naomi Wolf. And so, starts our journey into the world of our twisted opposites. Both personal and political the book itself is very hard to define but Klein, through her experience of continually being confused with Wolf, tries to provide a framework for how we can move forward out of the political morass we all seem to be stuck in. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is located in the library’s Popular Reading collection on LL2. Check it out!

East Side Story 40th Anniversary, vols. 1-12 (limited edition CD box set) produced by East Side Records

Dean rowan, interim director.

All of the reviews herein by yours truly veer into music at the expense of print, but this one is extremely skewed. East Side Story is a collection of twelve CD compilations of recordings from many decades, all tied to the scenes in East L.A. I grew up just east of East L.A., but not far from the vaunted Whittier Blvd. The liner notes are spare here, which I lament, but bottom-line says it’s about the music. Holy cow, the music! Doo-wop, ballads, thumping bass, banging rhythm sections, vocal harmonies, virtuosity…it all delivers. There are celebrities: Big Jay McNeely, The Four Tops, Smokey, The Miracles, Bloodstone, and mostly lesser known one hit wonders. The CDs run short, because they reproduce an older series of LPs. Production is hot, not hi-fi, but it fares well on a dance floor with strobes flashing and amplifiers clipping. If you dig nights on Whittier Blvd. in Pico Rivera, Boyle Heights, or even Whittier, get this box.

Also available on vinyl.

Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer

Helen kerwin, clinical supervising attorney, international human rights clinic.

From Amazon: “An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer.”

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir by Curtis Chin

Colleen chien, professor of law.

A delicious, heartfelt, funny and super satisfying read now on the bestseller list about growing up gay and Chinese American in Detroit, from a relative by marriage.

The Golden Gate by Amy Chua

Charlotte daugherty, legal research librarian - foreign & comparative law.

Amy Chua, ( Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ), has written a mystery that takes place in Berkeley, with excursions to San Francisco landmarks in Nob Hill and Chinatown. The mystery at the heart of the book is less compelling than her imagined and researched picture of Berkeley in the 1940s. Readers of the epilogue will also learn that Madame Chiang Kai-Shek did in fact live in Berkeley briefly in a house on Avalon Street.

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood by Ed Zwick

Edna lewis, reference & outreach librarian.

I’m a sucker for a book about the movie business and found director and producer Ed Zwick’s memoir quite satisfying. Zwick made one of my favorite movies, Glory , which tells the story of a negro battalion in the Civil War as well as Thirtysomething , the TV show that captured the yuppie generation. His movies are quite varied ( Blood Diamond , The Last Samurai , Legends of the Fall ), and he was involved in the production of Shakespeare in Love and Traffic among other well-known films.

Whether because he’s in his 70s, has been fighting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma for a number of years or is just willing to settle some scores, Zwick does not pull any punches in his memoir. Spoiler Alert: Brad Pitt and Matthew Broderick come off badly while Leonardo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhal are admired for their hard work, acting ability and professionalism. He also had an early run in with Harvey Weinstein on Shakespeare in Love which reveals just how scary and awful Weinstein was in business (Zwick sued Weinstein and won).

Aside from the great dish, Zwick also sprinkles in a lot about how movies are made and the different kinds of people it takes to make them. There is also a wistfulness in his memoir with his acknowledgment that the type of movies he made and loves have given way to comic book franchises and action adventure movies filled with CGI.

Home: A Memoir of My Early Years by Julie Andrews

From Amazon: “In Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, Julie takes her listeners on a warm, moving, and often humorous journey from a difficult upbringing in war-torn Britain to the brink of international stardom in America. Her memoir begins in 1935, when Julie was born to an aspiring vaudevillian mother and a teacher father, and takes listeners to 1962, when Walt Disney himself saw her on Broadway and cast her as the world's most famous nanny.

Along the way, she weathered the London Blitz of World War II; her parents' painful divorce; her mother's turbulent second marriage to Canadian tenor Ted Andrews; and a childhood spent on radio, in music halls, and giving concert performances all over England.

Julie's professional career began at the age of 12, and in 1948 she became the youngest solo performer ever to participate in a Royal Command Performance before the queen. When only 18, she left home for the United States to make her Broadway debut in The Boy Friend, and thus began her meteoric rise to stardom.

Home is filled with numerous anecdotes, including stories of performing in My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison on Broadway and in the West End, and in Camelot with Richard Burton on Broadway; her first marriage to famed set and costume designer Tony Walton, culminating with the birth of their daughter, Emma; and the call from Hollywood and what lay beyond.”

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Laura riley, director, clinical program.

Reading Rebecca Makkai's new book I Have Some Questions for You , which I liked a lot, reminded me of how much I loved her The Great Believers. The AIDS epidemic and crisis was really not that long ago, but this work of fiction reminded me of how much medical advancement we might take for granted. It is also a story of friendship, loyalty, and how to live life with connection.

titleByAuthor

Reviewercommaposition, jewish space lasers: the rothschilds and 200 years of jewish conspiracy theories by mike rothschild, kate peck, cataloging.

Journalist Mike Rothschild (no relation) recounts the history of a family that emerged from the ghettos of Frankfurt to revolutionize European banking, all while maintaining their Jewish heritage. It seems only natural that sordid lies and fables would arise around the family, the echoes of which reverberate to this day, but the real stories are far more interesting - from the vital role that Nathan Rothschild played in keeping Wellington's army funded in the war against Napoleon, to Nica Rothschild (officially Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter) supporting jazz greats like Charlie Bird and Thelonious Monk. This lively and engaging book offers insight into the ways that Jews have been targeted throughout history through the lens of one family.

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Four women have spent their lives as assassins for a clandestine organization called The Museum. Now, as they have reached sixty, all they want to do is retire, lead quiet and normal lives, and get through menopause. Instead, someone is trying to kill them. This story is a lot of fun and has plenty of action, à la The Prisoner crossed with Golden Girls . If you like espionage fiction and cozy mysteries, you just might love Killers of a Certain Age . It is located in the library’s Popular Reading collection on LL2. Check it out!

The Legendborn Cycle by Tracy Deonn (YA)

I-wei wang, reference librarian.

This series has been a bright spot in my sometimes wearying journey through my tweenager’s YA fantasy/sci-fi obsession. The plotlines of many of her favorites read like The Hero with a Thousand Faces , plus a few romantical dilemmas and quirky sidekicks (though I must admit I am a fangirl for Doomslug, the sea cucumber-like extraterrestrial buddy in the Skyward universe). What would a grown-ass woman be doing, reading stuff like this? Well, I’ll tell you.

Sixteen-year-old Bree is an extraordinary girl living a relatively ordinary life until the circumstances of her mother’s sudden death draw her into the circle of a mysterious group of powerful magic-wielders, where she uncovers her own powers and learns the hidden truth of her ancestry and destiny—which involves fighting demonic forces, falling (maybe?) in love (maybe a couple of times), and (presumably, eventually) uniting her people in freedom by bringing humanity the boons of her supernatural journey: The heroine with a thousand faces.

But Bree is also a Black girl at UNC … not to mention trying to iron out her relationships with the Popular Cute Boy and the Cold (But Hot) Bad Boy … and simultaneously working to fit into the exclusive secret society on campus, the Legendborn—the sword-swinging, demon-slaying, spell-casting inheritors of the legends of King Arthur and his knights. Tracy Deonn infuses the conventions of the YA fantasy genre—relationship drama, friendship drama, Mean Girl/social drama, confusing-growth-of-magical-powers drama—with emotional depth and history-freighted dimensions. In Author’s Notes, Deonn explains that she draws upon her own experiences of dealing with traumatic grief; of bearing the burden, as “every Black girl who was ‘the first,’” to break barriers; and of being part of a rooted tradition of survivors and warriors in the shadows of white supremacy. These features of Bree’s emotional and psychological journeys are deftly and seamlessly woven into her character’s development, never in a didactic or overt manner (my kid, who disdains simplistic moralism, would certainly have noticed). There are a few details that could be read as a distortion or over-simplification of the Arthur legends (and there are no coconut-laden swallows whatsoever). But the Arthurian themes as deployed by Deonn illustrate both the power of reductionist, eurocentric myth-making and the possibilities of myth-busting and myth-blending.

I enjoyed the eponymous opening volume, Legendborn, enough to eagerly devour its sequel Bloodmarked —and to anticipate buying the next installment, Oathbound , in hardcover when it comes out early next year. (I can only hope this series is not as drawn out as, say, the ten sprawling volumes—plus a totally bogus “volume 8.5”—of the Keeper of the Lost Wallet series). Deonn’s skillful building of action and suspense, and the heroine’s romantic and other adventures, make these books a good immersive beach read. Yet she also packs enough thought-provoking backstory and emotionally powerful growth to make you feel less like an idiot, even if you (as a grown-ass person) were seen reading it in public. Plus, who wouldn’t love that cover?

A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner

William h.d. fernholz, lecturer in residence.

Marion Milner, the author of A Life of One’s Own , was born in 1900 and her long life overlapped the 20th Century almost perfectly. At age 26, dissatisfied with her life and suspecting that the source of her dissatisfaction was in her attitude rather than outside circumstances, Milner endeavored to find out how to increase her happiness by studying those fleeting moments where she felt joy. Thus began an eight-year habit of diary-keeping and reflection. Her day-by-day self-observation became the empirical bedrock upon which she theorized about her own nature and created techniques for more fully participating in the joys of her life.

Milner, writing under the pen name Joanna Field, completed A Life of One’s Own in 1934. The book, last reprinted in 2011 and soon to be republished by Routledge, is neither a memoir, nor a self-help book in the conventional sense. Rather, it is stylistically unique, a genre of one. It is often a near-Talmudic commentary on Milner’s journals, the substance and methods of which changed as her aims evolved. Thus, the book is also a travelog, where the journey is internal and self-reflective, and the externalities of her life—career, marriage, friendships, and so on—are happenstance noted primarily to put her inner dramas in context.

A Life of One’s Own is a book about technique. Milner recounts her revelations about her own life, but contends that the value of her book, and the reason she wrote it, are in the methods that yielded these insights. Those methods anticipate the main currents of psychology and self-help in the latter half of the 20th Century, from journaling and free writing, to mindfulness, to positive psychology, and even to Daniel Kahneman’s insights about thinking fast and slow. Milner’s conclusions from her introspection and reflection are a prophecy of what academic psychology would reveal decades later.

On the surface, Milner is a typical Austenite heroine: young, upper class but not secure, and unsatisfied with the constraints of her life. Of course, Virginia Woolf, who published the similarly-named A Room of One’s Own a half decade earlier, is the most obvious influence. But while Woolf identifies structural sexism as the source of limitation and money and autonomy as the solution, Milner looks inward to the constraints on living we impose on ourselves, long after the ego-forming authorities of our childhood – parents, peers, priests, and teachers – have ceded their actual power. For her, the journey from object to subject, from passive to active voice in one’s own life, starts in the attitude we take. Its lasting value is in exploring the sources of happiness when affluence is not enough.

Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey (Ages 2 and up)

I was reminded of the iconic children’s book Make Way for Ducklings recently when my car was halted at Highland Avenue and Park Way while the police helped some goslings cross the street in a Make Way For Goslings moment (see pics).

Ah, Make Way for Ducklings . Winner of the 1941 Caldecott Medal. Humor, brilliant illustrations - this tale of a family of ducklings making their way to the Boston Public Garden is classic and wonderful. Can you recite the names of the ducklings? I can - Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack.

My husband is a native Bostonian and for him Make Way for Ducklings is the standard by which all other children’s books must be judged. The McCloskey estate has done very well by all the copies we have purchased for folks over the years. Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine are two other McCloskey classics worth checking out.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Andrew charles baker, assistant professor of law.

One of my favorite works of non-fiction that I recommend at every opportunity is The Making of the Atomic Bomb , a Pulitzer-prize winning book by Richard Rhodes. The cinematic adaptation of American Prometheus (Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin) by Christopher Nolan in the recent Oscar-winner Oppenheimer has hopefully renewed public interest in the Manhattan Project. While the personal relationships of Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss are apparently intriguing to many, I think that they, objectively, pale in comparison to the story of how the bomb was actually built. Rhodes masterfully documents how a dispersed group of eccentric academics, military officials, and politicians raced against time to translate a scientific possibility into one of humanity’s most consequential inventions. Regardless of your position on the creation or use of the bomb, the story of how it came to exist is a thrilling read.

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki

In my opinion probably the greatest contemporary Japanese novel.

From Amazon: “Tsuruko, the eldest sister of the once-wealthy Makioka family, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The shy, unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances and dreaming of studying fashion design in France. Filled with vignettes of a vanishing way of life, The Makioka Sisters is a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family—and an entire society—sliding into the abyss of modernity. It possesses in abundance the keen social insight and unabashed sensuality that distinguish Tanizaki as a master novelist.”

My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan

An unnamed wife and mother details the events and concerns of her week in the debut novel from French author Maud Ventura. Happily, or sadly (it depends on your taste), our narrator is psychologically unhinged and spiraling. We get to read in great detail, her every thought, her every manipulation. This train is hurtling down the track to an inevitable wreck, when, PLOT TWIST! No, I am not going to tell you that twist. I will not mince words; this book is not for everyone. It is pure avocado meaning either you are going to love it, or you are going to hate it, there is no in-between here. Personally, I like literature with women on the verge, so I really liked it. My Husband is located in the library’s Popular Reading collection on LL2.. Check it out!

Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi

From Amazon: “Dr. Pereira is an aging, lonely, overweight journalist who has failed to notice the menacing cloud of fascism over Salazarist Lisbon. One day he meets Montiero Rossi, an aspiring young writer whose anti-fascist fervor is as strong as Pereira’s apolitical languor. Eventually, breaking out of the shell of his own inhibitions, Pereira reluctantly rises to heroism―and this arc is “one of the most intriguing and appealing character studies in recent European fiction” ( Kirkus ).”

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson

How technologies from crop rotation to social media have often failed to live up their promise of shared prosperity. A must-read in the age of AI by the duo behind Why Nations Fail .

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Andrew charles baker, assistant professor law.

A work of fiction that I recently read and greatly enjoyed was the 2023 Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song , by Paul Lynch. Set in a fictionalized version of modern-day Ireland undergoing an authoritarian takeover, Prophet Song centers the lives of a family navigating the tension between self-preservation and resistance. The story demonstrates how dystopia can creep in gradually and then all at once. Above all else, it serves as a necessary reflection on grief and survival in times of political uncertainty, especially for those of us in the West who have not (yet) lived through a wholesale societal collapse.

The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, no. 89 (Feb. 2024)

This review is an exercise in conspicuous consumption, because it begins with an imprudent purchase I recently made from Albion Records, a British record label associated with the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society. The Society and the label aim “to encourage a wider knowledge of Vaughan Williams’ music, his writings and his life…” One day Albion Records had a sale on most of its recordings, many of which I already had on my shelves. The sale allowed me to fill many gaps. Shortly after placing the order I received emails from the Society President and the Membership Officer. Ultimately, I became a member, a benefit of which is the Journal subscription. I am enjoying the Journal. It is clearly a labor of knowledge and affection, which I’m eager to tap, and a force of resistance against the haters who characterize the work of RVW and his ilk as “cow-pat music.” More generously, Peter Warlock is said to have compared RVW’s Pastoral Symphony to a cow staring over a fence. I enjoy Warlock’s music, too, and the notion of a cow staring over a fence isn’t as derogatory as what occurs at the other end. Do I have a strong recommendation for the Journal? It’s too soon to say, but I heartily recommend seeking an acquaintance with the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Spiders: Learning to Love Them by Lynne Kelly

This book is so good for so many reasons - one of them being the very cute jumping spider on the cover. I don't think I am alone in the act of catching spiders in the house and escorting them outside and this is always a good opportunity to take a closer look at the thing I just caught. Often, I find myself trying to definitively identify the spider I have just caught and get frustrated that there isn't an easy application that will let me identify it using various characteristics (or is there and I am not aware of it?). There are so many things people say about spiders that seem like common knowledge but I am not sure they are true. Here's one for you: Daddy-Longlegs (probably also Mommy-Longlegs) are one of the most poisonous spiders but they can't bite humans. Without going into the distinction of poisonous versus venomous, is this true? Read the book or look it up! Here is another one: People swallow eight spiders per year. Is this right? To quote the Past & the Curious podcast, "it's worse than right, it's wrong." It gets even better - this is from a 1993 PC Professional article by a columnist called Lisa Holst who made up a list of 'facts' that would be accepted as truth because it was stated by email or on the internet. This is the article cited in the book and when I looked up that article to see the other nonsense that would be believable lies in 1993 I found something even better than better .

In the end, the book is an entertaining read if you like both stories about individual spiders and want to know more than you thought you wanted to know about how spiders work. It definitely makes spiders much less troublesome and I apologize to each unseen spider when I accidentally bump through an ill-situated web. It also helps me understand why I can't simply list a bunch of visual characteristics and be told what kind of spider I am looking at - there are so many spiders out there and many of them are not identified because identification is actually quite difficult. I should note that the woman who wrote this appears to live in Australia. Common knowledge tells us that Australia might have some of the best spiders and the way that the author writes about them really gives some perspective to the ones I am looking at.

Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel

Malcolm m. feeley, claire sanders clements professor emeritus.

While working on a never-ending book on the role of private entrepreneurs in shaping the structures of and Anglo-American criminal justice system, I read extensively about Zebulon Ward, who pioneered and perfected convict leasing. A Republican and staunch Unionist, and a slaveholder, he made a fortune leasing predominantly white convicts in Kentucky in the early 1850’s. Following the War, he plied his trade, first in Tennessee, where he made a bundle, and then in Arkansas, where he became one of the state’s wealthiest residents. From his early years, he was obsessed about tracking down runaway slaves.

Henrietta Wood was born into slavery in Kentucky, sold twice in her youth and separated from her family when taken to New Orleans, where she worked for a family. There, the head of household in deep financial troubles, fled, leaving a wife, two children, and her slave, Henrietta Wood. The abandoned wife makes her way to Cincinnati, where she runs a successful boarding house, but is pursued by her husband’s creditors. She frees Wood, perhaps so Wood won’t be seized, and perhaps because she wants Wood to keep working for her.

Zebulon Ward learns that Wood, who was born in his hometown, has been freed, kidnaps her, and sells her down the river. Back to New Orleans, she is resold to a plantation owner who moves to Texas to avoid the War, and is held in slavery until 1868, when the War finally ends there, and she is freed for a second time. Through determination and good fortune, she makes her way back to Cincinnati, encounters Zebulon Ward by accident, receives aid from a sympathetic lawyer, and institutes a restitution suit for $20,000. After countless delays over nearly a decade, she finally prevails. Of sorts. In her suit against the by-then multi-millionaire, Zebulon Ward, the jury awards her $2500.

The aftermath. In a chance encounter, Ward reconnects with her brother from whom she had been separated by her sale decades earlier. She goes on to live a modest life in Chicago for many more years, and as a single mother raises a son who is the first Black graduate of Union College of Law (now Northwestern University School of Law), who had a long and successful career in Chicago.

I have only touched on the many perils and coincidences in this amazing account. It is a story worthy of Charles Dicken. Except it is not fiction. Neither is it a generalized account of good triumphing over evil. Nor does the author present it in this manner. Zebulon Ward is pure evil, and escapes meaningful accountability—the check for $2500 becomes an anecdote for Ward to recount to his horse racing crowd in New York City, the description of the slave auction house in Natchez is chilling, and the account of heartbreak and permanent misery caused by sale and forced separation of slave families is frightening. But, it is a gripping account of evil in a single case overcome by a strong woman whose incredible determination coupled with good fortune allowed her to prevail.

I am hardly alone in thinking highly of this book. Its author, W. Caleb McDaniel, professor of history at Rice University, received the Pulitzer Prize for it in 2020.

Table for Two: Fictions by Amor Towles

I love Amor Towles’ writing and while I really would have preferred another novel, this new collection of stories is lovely, capturing the look and feel of his various books - Rules of Civility , A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway . In fact the character Evelyn Ross from Rules of Civility becomes the central character in a noirish novella set in Los Angeles. Towles is a stylish and witty writer. Even his throwaway observations made me chuckle (e.g. “Next I gathered up the pamphlets, brochures and magazines scattered about the room and dumped them in a drawer. Because even in a nice hotel, all that printed matter can make you feel like you’ve taken up residence in the waiting room of your dentist’s office.”). A thoroughly enjoyable collection.

Thursday Next Series by Jasper Fforde

Catherine (kt) albiston, jackson h. ralston professor of law, professor of sociology, faculty director of the center for the study of law and society.

I love Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next futuristic series of novels set in the Great Library. Here’s a link to the complete series. And here’s a description cribbed from the Tales from a Hollow Tree blog: “In Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series a world where you can—if you have the gift—actually jump into books, that library is the Great Library, the library where each and every book is alive .

Fforde compares everyday books versus Great Library books to photos versus the people they represent. The Great Library is a bit like an intermediary between fictional (or literal, as there are nonfiction books as well) worlds, and it contains every version of every book ever published, alphabetically by author on twenty six separate floors, one for each letter of the alphabet. In the Well of Lost Plots—the subterranean levels of the library—it also contains every version of every unpublished and/or unfinished manuscript, as well, and there are places in the Well of Lost Plots where books are demolished bit by bit and can be sold off piecemeal to be turned into something new. In the main section of the library there are also the basic creature comforts of tables and chairs at which to read, of course.”

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin

See the blurb from Goodreads below for description. But the BEST thing about this book is the writing, it is so good and not pretentiously so, but in service of the story. As soon as I finish I'm going back to read it again.

From Goodreads: “Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.”

For you grammarians out there note the inclusion of the Oxford comma.

The Trump indictments: the Historic Charging Documents with Commentary introduced, annotated, and with supporting materials by Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissmann

Ramona collins, circulation.

I see that I wasn’t finished reading the last book I reviewed and the same is true here. However, after only reading the Preface, Introduction, Chronology of Key Dates, and skipping ahead to the part about the New York Indictment, i.e., the case that has DJT in trial and constantly on the news right now, I am infinitely better informed about the charges and the evidence that has been presented so far. The authors organize the material in a logical way in contrast to how I’ve encountered the same material out in the wild. Each indictment (DC January 6, Fulton County, Georgia, Southern District of Florida, and New York) has its own Introduction, Cast of Characters and the Indictment itself – meticulously footnoted and citing to the relevant statutes at play. Names I’ve been hearing about here and there are clarified. Fun fact: Karen McDougal is not the same as Susan McDougal! The significance of a class E felony is clear. I look forward to digging into the details presented here so I don’t have to fall into a news rabbit hole. Many thanks to Kristie Chamorro for lending me her copy of the book. We’re all about sharing here in the law library. We also have a copy at this link .

Trust: A Novel by Hernan Diaz

Kristie chamorro, technology and instructional services librarian.

Trust , winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an intricate story set in the opulent world of old money in early-20th century New York. The novel explores capitalism, power, and how people shape their own narratives. I especially enjoyed how the story unfolds through four distinct parts – a novel, an unfinished autobiography, a memoir, and a journal – each a piece of a complex narrative puzzle. An added gold star from me was that part of the story intersects with the work of librarians and their role in preserving knowledge and memory. I highly recommend both the print and audio versions (I bounced back and forth between them) for your summer reading!

The Tudors: Art & Majesty in Renaissance England by Elizabeth Cleland & Adam Eaker

A traveling exhibition of artwork and objects from the eponymous dynasty landed last year at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. This is the catalog from that exhibition. I have not read the catalog from beginning to end, and I have only skimmed the reproductions, but if you have the slightest interest in Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, their associates and nemeses, or Renaissance Faires, then “hie thee” (Macbeth, Act 1, scene 5) to this exquisite tome (a word that I’m shocked to learn Shakespeare did not use in his/her/their plays). I’m partial to the portraits and miniatures, Holbein and Hilliard, the color and filigree, but the quotidian objects can be fascinating. Plainly, I need a new tankard and an upgraded suit of armor. For me, these objects are enthralling correlatives to the music of the time, which I listened to on long nights of homework in high school and college.

The Twilight Zone: A Novel by Nona Fernández

From Amazon: “It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the “man who tortured people” to places that archives can’t reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel’s title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.

How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.”

The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner

Dwight Garner, the New York Times book critic, dishes up a memoir of thinking about food, eating food, reading about eating food, shopping for food, and then eating again. Garner categorizes the book into breakfast, lunch, shopping, nap, drinks and dinner intertwining famous writers' observations on eating with stories from his own life. He’s no food snob either. His memories of mayonnaise, baloney and peanut butter pickle sandwiches from his West Virginia childhood are as fond and reverent as those of gourmet meals shared with friends in NYC. He’s funny and warmhearted and you should just settle in and enjoy. I read this book on a cross country plane flight recently and was entertained the whole way through. Then I got off the plane and went looking for something to eat.

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

This book digs into many of the issues surrounding unchecked big tech algorithms. The author talks about issues surrounding using algorithms for teacher evaluations, job applications, housing, banking, and more. It won't be a spoiler to know that these algorithms often work against everyone, especially poor and diverse communities. It was interesting to see how she compares the algorithms popularized by the system in the Moneyball stories to the common ones that have an effect on people's lives. One of the main missing components of algorithms that can ruin or hinder lives is that they are assumed to be correct and there is no evaluation or feedback of the 'correctness' of the algorithm's decision. One of the other big issues is that companies don't want to make algorithms transparent - the algorithm is where the money is made so not only can you not really know how a machine comes to a result, no one will tell you.

This book is an entertaining read full of interesting sadness that ruins lives and creates profits for countless entities. I would like to say it has a happy ending but it is clear that much of the issues are systemic and we will need to rely on government action to hold private companies accountable for bad algorithms. You can decide if that is a happy ending.

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides, narrated by Peter Noble (Audiobook)

Marlene harmon, reference librarian.

My father in-law served in the marine corp in the South Pacific in WWII. He rarely spoke of his experiences there, which included witnessing the iconic flag raising on Iwo Jima, but he returned with a deep love of it and of Polyenesian culture. I thought of him as I listened to this well written, researched and nuanced tale of Cook’s last voyage. He would have loved it. The title sums it up succinctly, and the text lays out the events of the voyage in fascinating detail. Sides relies not only on Cook’s own words in ship’s logs and journals, but diaries, journals, and letters of the officers and crew of the Resolution and the Discovery , the two ships the voyage was made in. After leaving England and reaching Tahiti on this last of his three great voyages, Cook pointed his ships north towards Alaska, the true, secret purpose of the voyage being to find the fabled Northwest Passage. It was en route to Alaska that Cook and his crew almost serendipitously became the first Europeans to “discover” the Hawaiian islands, and were stunned by what indeed seemed a paradise. They continued to Alaska, and failing in their mission to find any kind of Northwest Passage, made the “fateful” decision to return to Hawaii. I listened to the audiobook, but you will need a map of Cook’s voyage, and you may even feel like you’ve been on it yourself when you get to the end of this book, a destination I was sorry to reach.

A Woman of Pleasure by Murata Kiyoko, translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Kathryn hashimoto, copyright law fellow.

This exceptional work of historical fiction, set in southern Japan at the turn of the 20th century, tells of a year in the life of a 15-year-old named Aoi Ichi, who has been sold by her desperate, impoverished family to a brothel in a pleasure district ruled by the powerful brothel owners’ association. While Ichi is initiated into the brutal realities of indentured servitude along with her fellow sex workers, she is mentored by two women: the top courtesan at the brothel, and the instructor at the Female Industrial School where the girls learn how to read, write, and speak like courtesans. This reflects two actual developments of the time: laws ostensibly acknowledging the rights of sex workers (by equating them with work animals) and educational advancement for women. Inspired by real-life historical events, the novel explores women’s rights and workers’ rights in the context of class and labor unrest across Japan. Murata is a long acclaimed, prize-winning Japanese author, though this is the first of her writings to be translated into English. One remarkable aspect of her novel is its deceptively light-hearted tone, conveying quotidian details of brothel life as a picaresque. The prose is simple and clear and a breeze to read, but is also rich and affecting. It manages to envision what might be achieved through empowerment, self-determination, and solidarity.

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Kristi Noem’s story of killing her dog points to class two misdemeanor

South Dakota governor’s account of family dog Cricket killing neighbor’s chickens may be an offence, according to state law

Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, may have committed a class two misdemeanor offence when her fated dog Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer Noem deemed “untrainable” for hunting pheasant, killed a neighbor’s chickens.

Under South Dakota law, “any person owning, keeping, or harboring a dog that chases, worries, injures, or kills any poultry or domestic animal is guilty of a class two misdemeanor and is liable for damages to the owner thereof for any injury caused by the dog to any such poultry or animal.”

Though Cricket’s chicken attack has made headlines in recent days, however, it was not the main subject of such reports.

Instead, Noem’s startling description of her decision to kill Cricket – and also an unnamed, un-castrated and unruly goat – has pitched her into an unprecedented political storm.

The story is included in Noem’s new book , No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.

The book will be released next month. Last week, the Guardian obtained a copy and reported the passage in which Noem describes killing Cricket and the goat after Cricket first ruined a pheasant hunt, then killed the chickens.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, before describing how she shot Cricket and the goat in the same gravel pit, the goat having to be shot twice, the second shotgun blast after Noem left the goat to fetch more shells from her truck.

Noem says what she thought she had to do was not “pleasant”, and describes how her actions startled a construction crew and confused her young daughter.

She also seems to acknowledge the possible effects of including the story in her book, writing: “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.”

News of Noem’s tale did indeed set off a political firestorm , with observers suggesting she had irrevocably damaged her chances of being named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president who faces 88 felony charges of his own and was adjudicated a rapist but nonetheless maintains his grip on his party.

Noem twice defended her account of killing Cricket and the goat, saying as she does in the book that such actions are sometimes necessary in farming, and show her willingness to do difficult things in life as well as in politics.

But each defense added to her problems.

In the first statement, Noem both referred to recently putting down three horses and advertised her book, promising “more real, honest and politically incorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping”. That drew accusations of insensitivity.

In her second statement, Noem said she could “understand why some people are upset about a 20-year-old story of Cricket” but added: “The fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down.

“Given that Cricket had shown aggressive behavior toward people by biting them” – Noem says the dog “whipped around to bite me” after killing the chickens – “I decided what I did.”

In a separate section of South Dakota’s codified laws, the definition of livestock makes no mention of poultry, which would have meant the law did not apply to Noem.

But asked about a South Dakota legislature definition that says livestock “means cattle, sheep, horses, mules, swine, goats, and buffalo”, omitting chickens or poultry in general, Ian Fury, Noem’s communications chief, advised the Guardian to “take a look at SDCL 40-34-1 and 40-34-2.”

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When the Guardian did, questions arose.

Section 40-34-1 of the South Dakota codified laws – Killing of dog lawful when disturbing domestic animals – says : “It shall be lawful for any person to kill any dog found chasing, worrying, injuring, or killing poultry or domestic animals except on the premises of the owners of said dog or dogs.”

Noem writes that she killed Cricket on her own property.

The following section – 40-34-2, Liability of owner for damages by dog disturbing domestic animals – seems to contain greater potential legal jeopardy.

It says : “Any person owning, keeping, or harboring a dog that chases, worries, injures, or kills any poultry or domestic animal is guilty of a class two misdemeanor and is liable for damages to the owner thereof.”

In her book, Noem writes that she apologised to the family that owned the chickens Cricket killed, “wrote them a check for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.

Asked if SDCL 40-34-2 indicated that Noem might have committed a class two misdemeanor, Fury did not immediately comment.

The South Dakota laws apparently applicable to the case of Noem and Cricket were passed before the dog’s death.

In her weekend statement, Noem said her story was 20 years old. That would place it in 2004, when she was in her early 30s, three years before she entered South Dakota state politics and six years before she won a seat in Congress as part of the hard-right Tea Party wave . Noem was elected governor of South Dakota in 2018.

South Dakota was the last of the 50 states to make animal cruelty a felony, passing legislation in 2014.

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Books of The Times

‘The Power Law’ Is a Funder-Friendly Look at the World of Venture Capital

By Jennifer Szalai

• Jan. 31, 2022
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It might be hard for most Americans to muster much sympathy for ultrarich venture capitalists, but Sebastian Mallaby wants us to try. In his new book, “The Power Law,” he argues that the funders of troubled outfits like WeWork and Uber have been unfairly maligned as exceedingly greedy and insufficiently skeptical — all too willing to look the other way when the entrepreneurs they back do something stupid or reprehensible, as long as there’s oodles of money to be made.

The truth, Mallaby says, is at once simpler and more complicated. After all, venture capital from the beginning was supposed to be about actual adventure — taking chances on technologies that were too far-out for a traditional bank loan.

“Venture investing came down to that scary jump from messy information to a binary yes-or-no call. It came down to living with the reality that you would frequently be wrong. It was about showing up at the next partners’ meeting, rising above your wounded pride and mustering the optimism to make fresh bets on a bewildering future.” This is just one of several fulsome passages in the book that may prompt you to ask: Did a venture capitalist write this?

As someone who enjoyed Mallaby’s “More Money Than God” (2010) and “The Man Who Knew” (2016) — his mostly flattering portraits of hedge funds and the former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, respectively — I anticipated that he would be gentle on the otherwise tight-lipped venture capitalists who agreed to talk to him. And he is. But where the indulgences of those earlier narratives were redeemed by ample demonstrations of Mallaby’s intelligence and storytelling skills, “The Power Law” mysteriously contains only trace amounts of either.

Part of the problem is that Mallaby never quite settles on the story he wants to tell. He introduces the book by laying out what he intends to do: “to explain the venture-capital mind-set” and “to evaluate venture capital’s social impact.” This mind-set, he says, revolves around the “power law” of his title — the idea that the distribution of phenomena is not “normal” but skewed. Instead of a bell curve, picture a long tail, where “winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate.” Adapt or die, sink or swim — there’s no middle ground. This is why V.C.s like to talk about “grand slams” and “moon shots”; Peter Thiel says that a fund’s top investment should generate returns so spectacular that it will outperform everything else in the fund put together.

This, clearly, isn’t the kind of logic that has much use for steady, incremental growth, to say nothing of a flourishing middle class. You might therefore wonder about the “social impact” of venture capital, which Mallaby deems to be, on the whole, good. He concedes that “V.C.s as individuals can stumble sideways into lucky fortunes,” or can sometimes do unhelpful things. But he is ultimately bullish on what they have to offer: “Venture capital as a system is a formidable engine of progress — more so than is frequently acknowledged.” That engine, Mallaby reminds us, has funded such ventures as the development of synthetic insulin and, more recently, plant-based alternatives to ecologically damaging meat.

“The Power Law” traces the origins of venture capital as we know it to the financing of the “Traitorous Eight” — a group of employees at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory who, in 1957, walked out of their jobs working for their “maniacal despot” of a boss. (Earlier examples of “venture vehicles,” Mallaby says, were more oriented toward philanthropy or public service.) The eight founded Fairchild Semiconductor with the help of a broker on the East Coast named Arthur Rock, who raised the requisite “liberation capital.”

Mallaby follows the history through to the present day. He makes a detour to discuss venture capital in China, where the industry, compared with Silicon Valley, happens to be “less of a boys’ club.” He gives examples of the different kinds of funds, with their various personalities and philosophies. There are V.C.s who see it as their role to act as mentors and coaches to inexperienced founders. There are V.C.s who insist on installing seasoned outsiders at start-ups to serve as C.E.O.s. There are also “founder-friendly” V.C.s, who promise to be hands-off, allowing genius, no matter how unorthodox or weird, to do its work.

The traditional power of venture capitalists to exert influence over founders has been eroded by an “increasingly rebellious youth culture,” Mallaby says, recounting how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg deigned to show up late for a meeting with the venerable firm Sequoia dressed in a T-shirt and pajama pants. But Mallaby also points to a structural change. He says that the balance of power has tipped in favor of the most sought-after entrepreneurs because they now have their pick among clamoring suitors: There’s more money than ever before in search of the next big thing.

The book includes a lot of granular detail about deals getting made, phone calls volleyed back and forth, meetings arranged and postponed. Banal bits of conversations get recounted, even when they seem only to serve as narrative clutter. (“What are you doing tomorrow morning?” “I’m doing nothing.” “Great, how about we meet for breakfast?”) Some of Mallaby’s metaphors make no sense; he writes that one V.C., learning about a happy surprise, “digested this bolt from the heavens.” Another V.C., also triumphant, “permitted himself just one discreet celebration, like a man who pumps his fist and screams a victory scream, but silently.” So this V.C. screamed but didn’t scream — and since he’s only “like” this tortured image, he didn’t pump his fist either?

Such is the material that pads this overstuffed book, which never quite delivers on the case it laboriously tries to make. Mallaby’s main argument is that venture capital funds disruption, and disruption is usually to the good. Innovation begets more innovation, delivering us from a stagnant status quo.

Mallaby has clearly done copious amounts of research, and it’s not as if he’s oblivious to the “alleged shortcomings” of venture capital; he just decides that they’re dwarfed by the “attractions of the industry.” A passing sentence allows that all the money poured into Uber in order to “blitzscale” and decimate the competition may have forced existing taxi operators to “compete on a distorted playing field,” but those “incumbent taxi operators,” Mallaby says, were too cozy with municipal regulators anyway. There’s no mention of how utterly calamitous the dominance of apps like Uber has been for such “incumbents” (a dirty word among disrupters) — the financial ruin, the suicides ; there’s only the cold (and questionable) conclusion that “cheap venture dollars served to balance that unfair advantage.”

Of the spectacular founder flameouts at Uber and WeWork, Mallaby’s apologia is a thing to behold. Their “responsible” V.C. backers may have kept quiet, registering any qualms “politely” and privately until embarrassing information became too public to be ignored, but the real blame, he says, lies not with those adults in the room but with “heedless, late-stage investors” — even though the same venture capitalists were happy to have their wayward founders take those “heedless” investors’ money.

There’s just one critique of venture capital that Mallaby says is deserved — the need for the industry to diversify beyond a “monoculture” that is “too white, too male, too Harvard/Stanford.” This is a fair assessment, but at this point it isn’t exactly speaking truth to power. Venture capitalists love to talk about boldness, but one imagines they will appreciate the tone of deferential restraint in this funder-friendly book; much better to get a familiar call for more diversity than anything that might call into question their bottom line.

Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai .

The Power Law Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future By Sebastian Mallaby 482 pages. Penguin Press. $30.

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When Missouri’s Senate Bill 775 (SB 775) became law in 2022, calling for criminal penalties on educators who provide students with materials containing “explicit sexual material,” Melissa Corey recognized the severe implications for collection development and spearheaded a swift response to preserve compliant books in school libraries.

Preserving Access

In August 2022, Missouri’s Senate Bill 775 (SB 775) became law, calling for criminal penalties on educators who provide students with materials containing “explicit sexual material,” imposing misdemeanor charges, a $2,000 fine, and a year in prison. Advised by legal counsel, several school districts removed graphic novels, books authored by or about people of color or LGBTQIA+ people, and resources on slavery and the Holocaust.

Melissa Corey, past president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians (MASL), is a champion of students’ intellectual freedom. She recognized the severe implications of SB 775 for collection development and spearheaded a swift response to preserve compliant books in school libraries. She also crafted statements and press releases, organized SB 775 listening sessions and office hours with MASL members, and collaborated with the Missouri Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri to legally challenge the bill, resulting in attempted retaliation by the Missouri House Budget Committee to pull state public library funding. The suit is currently in litigation.

Corey and task force chairs Dr. Jenna Kammer, Jenni George, and Andrea Sumy were instrumental in launching three MASL initiatives: introducing a new Lesson Plan Database, establishing the Denny O’Neil Graphic Novel category for MASL’s Readers Awards, and forming the Standards Task Force to develop instructional school library standards for Missouri.

Passionate about eliminating barriers to book access for economically disadvantaged students, Corey’s library hosts free book fairs, distributing 5,000 books to the community.

“This is my mission,” Corey says, “because even when we may not have had enough money, my parents always ensured we had enough books.”

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