DWD's Reviews

Published in September of 2021 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Evan Osnos. Duration: 17 hours, 7 minutes. Unabridged. Evan Osnos is a reporter for The New Yorker . He was inspired to write about the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the 2016 and 2020 elections when he returned from an multi-year assignment in China and noted that politics, journalism and even economics in the United States had changed. He didn't use this analogy, but I will: Parents don't notice their kids changing and growing because they see them every day. But, the aunts and uncles who only see them at the holidays can easily detect the changes. For Wildland Osnos went to three places that he used to live to investigate: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; and Clarksburg, West Virginia.  In West Virginia, he primarily looks at the changes in journalism such as the loss of local news and small town newspapers. He also looks at government pulling back environmental regulations and business avoidin...

Published by Oxford University Press in November of 2017. Cara H. Drinan is a law professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her book The War on Kids: How American Juvenile Justice Lost Its Way  deals primarily with the changes to the justice system over the last 30 years and the mostly unforeseen consequences of those changes. Drinan discusses how in the late 1980's and early 1990's the United States was experiencing a crime wave, including "the nation's peak murder rate" (p. 156) and a number of these criminals were minors. Lawmakers responded by making it easier to move cases involving juvenile offenders into adult court. Juvenile court, although imperfect, at least made some attempt to accommodate itself to the specific needs of youth offenders and offered opportunities to rehabilitate themselves. It also recognized the fact that young people's brains just work differently than adult brains (a point Drinan brings up often thr...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in August of 2013. Narrated by Jason Culp. Opening and closing chapters read by Mark R. Levin. Duration: 6 hours, 54 minutes. For the past several years Conservative commentator Mark R. Levin has been laying out his arguments that demonstrate the government is over-reaching its Constitutional limitations in a series of books. He has discussed the Supreme Court in Men in Black , the roots of statist politics in Liberty and Tyranny and pointed out the ongoing actions of statists in Ameritopia . Now, in The Liberty Amendments , Levin details how he would address the problem using a series of Constitutional amendments. Since it is unlikely that the current crop of Senators and Representatives would vote to amend the Constitution and limit their power, Levin urges the states to initiate the process by calling for a national convention. Mark R. Levin His proposed amendments include: -Term limits for Congress (12 years); -Repeal t...

Originally published in 2010. Published in 2011 by Harper. A death row case, the Supreme Court and Homeland Security politics come together in Supreme Justice . The central question of the death row case is does the government have the right to withhold information deemed to be important to national security in a murder trial? In the case featured in the story, Sara Woodruff is a police officer on death row for killing her former lover. She denies any involvement and points the finger at suspected connections with the CIA and Homeland Security. She is sure he was kidnapped from her apartment and executed and the government's refusal to talk is going to cost her her life.. The Supreme Court building If the story had been told from the point of view of Woodruff's defense team this book may have been quite suspenseful, entertaining and informative. Instead, it is told from the point of view of a set of ongoing Margolin characters: Dana Cutler, Brad Miller and Keith Eva...

An interesting head-to-head biography about two gentlemen who went head-to-head quite often during the Civil War. James F. Simon's Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney shines an interesting light on two overlooked aspects of 19th century American history. The first overlooked aspect is the Supreme Court, specifically the person of Roger Taney (pronounced Tawney), the Chief Justice most famous for what may be known for all time as his single worst legal opinion, and one of the most controversial and ill-considered opinions of all time - Dred Scott. Roger Taney   (1777-1864) Simon tells the story of Taney's life, including his surprisingly liberal views on slavery and his legal defense of blacks who were seized illegally to be sold into slavery, the fact that he freed most of his family's slaves and even provided a modest pension for the elderly ones. Taney even defended an the rights of an abolitionist preacher to preach his message in Maryland. However, it seems ...

I thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook The Supreme Court building The Tenth Justice is an interesting little morality play set at the Supreme Court. What do you do if you accidentally leak information about a supreme court case and someone uses that inside information to make a fortune? What do you do if they come back and threaten to expose your slip-up unless you provide more information? In my opinion, Meltzer's character does the wrong thing but that is what makes the story so interesting. Meltzer's dialogue works so well with Thomas Gibson's performance that it sounds as if they were in the room copying down the natural flow of the characters' conversations as they were spoken. Truly, they were very fun to listen to. I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Tenth Justice by Brad Meltzer.   Reviewed on October 15, 2004.

Audiobook 7 disks approx. 8 hours read by Jeff Riggenbach Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America is written by Mark Levin, talk show host, author, former member of the Reagan Administration, part of the Landmark Legal Foundation, National Review Online and numerous other endeavors. Levin offers a compelling argument that shows that the Supreme Court has overstepped its authority from its beginnings. Levin's arguments are presented in classic Levin style - direct and in your face. He opens with nearly an hour of biographies of various flawed and suspect court members that have served throughout the years. The purpose? To demonstrate that Supreme Court Justices are not legal gods, but flawed men and women who are susceptible to the same temptations of the elected politicians of the other branches to mis-use the machinery of government. Mark Levin He then lays out a history of the court's more questionable decisions and argues that the court does...