Steven White

Weird “middle of the road” take

Reviewed: 06-06-25

The authors claim to offer a middle of the road approach that balances traditional free speech values with values of protection from offensive ideas but they don’t. They just argue for standard American free speech values and add nothing new to the debate.

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Good distillation of the problems with originalism

Reviewed: 05-26-25

This is a good, short book that explicates some powerful arguments about the limits of originalism. There is some fluff but it’s still a worthwhile read. Don’t expect a grand, compelling alternative judicial philosophy though, the author doesn’t have one.

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In depth coverage

Reviewed: 05-17-25

I learned a lot from this book even though I’ve listened to multiple surveys on the French Revolution. The author mostly adopts the standard, nonjudgmental tone that fits an American centuries hence with the curious exception of sympathy for Robespierre. I suspect the author doesn’t know much about standard economic theory. Most economists think a limit on how much you can charge for grain leads people to put less effort into now-unprofitable cultivation and as a result there will be less grain. The author never discusses this in the context of multiple discussions of famines and “the maximum.”

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Terrible narration

Reviewed: 05-17-25

The narrator sounded like an AI. The book was mostly very basic but if this is your first book on France it isn’t that bad of a choice. I’d recommend A History of France by Viscount Norwich which is longer but gives much better coverage of the Middle Ages. He reads that one himself so if you’re an American like me his British accent might be irksome but as bad as the AI.

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Ronson’s worst

Reviewed: 05-20-23

I love Jon Ronson. This podcast, packaged as an audiobook, is a fun listen, but the reporting is terrible. It reminds me of his The Last Days of August in that he hints that he found something of substance throughout the podcast, but what he actually uncovered is that the mundane conventional wisdom holds up under scrutiny. He openly admits this in the final minutes of the final chapter. In this case, however, Ronson’s reporting is surprisingly shoddy. One oversight stands out: He makes frequent reference to the unsolved mystery of John Doe #2, the man seen with “Tim McVeigh” when he rented the truck used in the bombing, noting that the FBI gave up on its search for this key witness. Shockingly he never notes why the FBI stopped its search: they found him. John Doe #2 rented a truck at the store the day after McVeigh along with John Doe #1, the man in the police sketch who was not McVeigh but looked a lot like him. These guys had nothing to do with the bombing and the witnesses who identified them acknowledged that they made a mistake, confusing Doe #1 with McVeigh due to their similar appearance. Ronson has no excuse for not including this in the final episode where he admits that what he founds is a nothing burger.

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Title is misleading

Reviewed: 09-29-22

This is a general introduction to the cabinet and it’s history and function. It doesn’t focus on particularly bad cabinets except in a lecture on corruption and it brings up good cabinets mostly to illustrate a general theme (e.g how cabinets can be teams of rivals). It isn’t a bad Great Course but it wasn’t what I expected.

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Good but not great

Reviewed: 09-24-20

I like all of the "The Great Courses" about the law but this one fell a little flat for me. Some of it might be because there is a lot of very basic material, esp. if you have heard the "Law School for Everyone" series or have a background in law, but even the discussion of the cases I often found myself not caring. I think it has something to do with the pacing, which is generally very slow but over without any time to reflect, or even understand too much of the context, when discussing the big cases. I don't know.

If there were a 3.5 star option that is what I could give this one. I wanted to like it more, but I didn't.

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11 people found this helpful

Great performance

Reviewed: 09-24-20

Jeffrey Toobin's books are all good but among those this one is in the middle of the pack. It runs a little long, but at 2x it never gets boring. Rob Shapiro's narration is stellar, esp. when reading quotes from the characters. I laughed when I heard his rendition of Jerome Corsi and I didn't know whether to act or cry when he read a long except of a Trump speech that closes the book.

I only have one criticism: Toobin dishes out some harsh criticism about Mueller's work but he also adds some glowing praise about his general character to ease the sting. I didn't understand that. Mueller is a Marine. He can take the very deserved crticism.

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Good portraits of public servants

Reviewed: 06-10-20

The book starts by discussing the lack of effort the Trump team put into the presidential transition. The subtext is that many Americans don't value what the federal government does for them but that it is incredibly valuable. Unfortunately, the book does a poor job of selling that point because of its lack of cohesion.

The basic structure of the book is that we meet people at the Department of Energy, USDA, Dept. of Commerce, and (in the epilogue) the Coast Guard and learn about what they did with their lives and, occasionally, what they did in government. The one is the epilogue about a oceanographer's effort to build better data systems helped improve search and rescue in the oceans. It is by far the best part of the book. Unfortunately, the book is undermined by the fact that probably more than half of the discussion of what these people did was done before they worked in the government or has nothing to do with research or bureaucracy. We meet a data scientist, for example, who coined the term "data scientist," a USDA administrator who was an entrepreneur, and a female astronaut who later did something so forgettable that I can't remember why she is actually in the book. (Some of these side stories are interesting, including the discussion of that astronauts experience at NASA and about how weather prediction has improved so dramatically, but it doesn't add up to much.)

The book is also hurt by some weak arguments. The author quotes a data scientist saying that the U.S. wouldn't know about the opioid epidemic without Obama administration efforts to release data on opioid shipments in the mid-2010, but the truth is that people knew it was a problem for at least a decade beforehand. Epidemiologists had been warning about rising numbers of overdoses (fatal and non-fatal) for a decade before that. Of course, that doesn't undermine the point--all of that data for collected by state/local governments and collated by the CDC--but the claim is so obviously wrong it sticks out as a sore thumb and makes me wonder what else is wrong.

Lewis also tells us that American's who don't live in rural areas love the rural lifestyle and want to heavily subsidize it, but are crippled by opposition from voters in rural areas. That seems wildly improbable. I'm sure Republicans in rural areas use earmarks and other means to bring home plenty of bacon for their communities and are rewarded for it and I doubt the Congresspeople from NYC are doing that much to subsidize rural life.

This book is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

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Not that fun or educational

Reviewed: 06-10-20

This short book is the author has an interesting frame: the author is quitting caffeine cold-turkey, hoping its absence will teach him something about its importance and effects. He circles back to his experience staying off caffeine for months a couple times in the book, including at the end. It's a good frame.

Otherwise, there isn't much worth learning from this book. There are a few cute historical facts (King Charles II banned coffeehouses because he thought they fostered a spirit of rebellion) and stories (one about stealing a coffee plant from Java), but a lot of the historical discussion goes in very broad strokes and suggests caffeine and coffee were incredibly important without any real evidence. The main thing I learned from this book is that caffeine has a long elimination half-life (about 6 hours) and that it works in your brain by competing to bind in adenosine receptors. I didn't even know adenosine was an important ligand!

Basically, this book is ok but I got the feeling it was supposed to be a lot more fun than it is.

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