Strict Scrutiny

I really liked it I liked it a lot.

I loved it I thought it was great.

Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wild

It's basically a fictionalized account of the sterilization case Ralph versus Health and Human Services.

Ann Padgett's Tom Lake

I loved you know we just talked about in one of our recent episodes we talked about the case involving the Sackler and Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement Demon Copperhead is not only retelling of David Copperfield but very elementally about the opioid crisis and an incredible book and I feel like I'm a Barbara King-Solver completist I think I've read everything she's written and it was gratifying to see her get I thought the well-deserved Pulitzer for this book.

I'm so reminded of that Robert Cover article, Violence and the Word in NOMOS. Like this is one of these articles, sort of a classic of jurisprudence. And it's basically this idea that legal process itself can be a form of violence.

The Firm by John Grisham is my favorite book and he's probably the reason why I went to law school.

One thing that I think we can't finish this book recommendation conversation without mentioning is Nicole Hannah Jones 1619 project.

And he said, and I had in stock a bunch of copies of The 1619 Project that Nicole Hannah Jones has signed.

sign of hope in his latest book and subscribe to the Midas Touch podcast today.

I thought maybe you were going to talk about Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed, which was fantastic and so good.

And basically it's a story of all of these sites in American history and how they sort of reckon with the difficult questions in their past. Yeah. And because he has a chapter about Monticello, I have been waiting for the last year.

That is just I think like maybe the best book I've read in the last five years. If you are into kind of the format of polyphonic fiction.

I think I read it maybe two or three years ago but really, really loved it and in a similar vein this you know for opening the kind of category to things that really left an impression but not just this year.

I think Homegoing and Pachinko were probably top couple books in the last five years at least and the TV adaptation of Pachinko is also so far holding up amazingly well.

So I bought a bunch of copies of A Promised Land, Barack Obama's autobiography, which I feel like is a good book to read and hard copy.

The audible audio book of it is great. Is it? You listen to it?

She has been a leader in creating the field of health law and is the author of the 2020 book Policing the Womb, Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.

And Michelle, it's almost like you were prescient and called this when you wrote your book Policing the Womb.

So I wrote The Some of Us in many ways to answer the question for myself and for so many of the advocates that I had spent nearly 20 years in the field of progressive advocacy with, which is the question of why can't we have nice things and why is it so hard for this country to get its act together and provide for the basics of a decent standard of living for its people.

And in many ways, the answer that I discovered on this journey was that racism is the underlying driving force behind most of the dysfunction of our country's most vexing public problems. And the central metaphor for the book grew to be the story of the drained public pool.

Everything we believe comes from a story we've been told and all of the stories we have are told by some people for a certain purpose and so I wanted to go back and look at our history and really it became totally clear to me that the zero sum story was a justification for the original economic model in this country of stolen land and stolen people and stolen labor.

And I think that if it weren't for racism we would not have had the financial crisis and eight million jobs and 19 trillion dollars in household wealth could have been saved.

I think we have to deal with the story level right? It's a story that white parents have about the inferiority of black and brown children does not change over generations.

I finally read historian Joanne Friedman's Field of Blood, which was--

Donald Trump's vice president candidate JD Vance wrote the forward to Kevin Roberts new book which Vance describes as quote incredible bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America end quote and this book also happens to be about taking back Washington to save America that is the books title

men have been told this nonsense for decades now by the press and the politicians. The nonsense is apparently equality and equal rights for women.

In these circumstances, under the influence of this creed, the creed is the Equal Protection Clause, is it any wonder that so many men now feel adrift, bereft, and yes, ashamed to be men?

the mission of Manhood is bound up with fathering

marriage is where quote, a man learns to open his life to another and bind his fate to hers.

it is good for a man to exercise authority good for him and good for those around him