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58889 Re: Hey, ribit ... ya wanna get away and soak up some culture amongst da frogs?/ DE
   Decomposed > I finally finished Jeffrey Toobin's book. Would th... 		Zimbler0   6TH POPE   30 Sep 2024
 11:30 PM
58843 Re: Hey, ribit ... ya wanna get away and soak up some culture amongst da frogs?/ DE
   Re: “Jeffrey Toobin creates in The Nine a riveting story of one of the most important forces in American life today.”I finally finished Jeffrey Toobin's book.

Generally, I'm happy to be tackling "technical" books like this one at a fairly steady pace. I like to learn. In this case, I'm not so sure. The book was an accounting of the Supreme Court from roughly 1980 to 2007, mostly discussing the Rhenquist and Roberts Courts. It covered a lot of cases and a lot of Justices.

The positives are that it gave me a much better understanding of how the Court works, how it picks its cases, how its decisions were dominated for most of that time by certain Justices, particularly O'Connor and Kennedy, and some feel for the personalities of a few of the individuals. In many cases, I think the descriptions were twisted and corrupted by Toobin's bias.

The negatives are that Toobin was utterly unable to keep his political leanings out of the story, constantly sniping at the conservatives, particularly and quite viciously at Clarence Thomas. I think that insults must be Toobin's specialty, because he actually had very little to say about the liberal judges except for Ginsburg who he glorified.

That's essentially it. The book took me longer than it should have because I was never enthralled. It had no plot beyond what transpired year by year, and little theme beyond 'Conservative Extremists Bad. Conservative Decisions Wrong.' I'd even be okay with that if the book had only conveyed WHY they were so wrong and bad, but it didn't. (Precedent. Precedent. Precedent. That's the author's only explanation.)

In most complex cases, there are two sides. That's why, so often, these cases went 4 to 4 with the moderate O'Connor (and later Kennedy) deciding them. Toobin could have done a much better job, imo, of explaining the two positions. He instead tended to cover just one, criticizing the conservative position whenever it was victorious and heaping praise on O'Connor/Kennedy (both of whom were appointed by Republicans but did not live up to conservative expectations) if the liberals won.

Too bad. It could have been a good book. It needed a different author.

Next in line is the tiny "Heaven is For Real" by Todd Burpo. I won't be "studying" it but I'll read it. I mostly want to see how Heaven is described by the child who claims to have been there.