Notorious RBG - Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik

One of the categories for my 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge is "A book about an interesting woman."  The clear choice for this, for me, was RBG--Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of the Supreme Court Justices and the most senior of the liberal side of the court.  I took a few law classes in school and we read many of her opinions--both majority and dissents--during those classes.  Her opinions sizzle.  One of them absolutely slams Congress, essentially saying that the Court shouldn't really be ruling on the issue at hand, but something has to be done about it, and Congress is refusing to do their jobs, so the Court is going to do it.  Wow.  Love it.  But there was a lot about RBG herself that I really didn't know, so this was a great opportunity to fit the book into my reading queue.

This a good overview, I think.  There aren't a ton of books about RBG, which I totally understand because, well, she's still alive.  It's hard to write a comprehensive biography of someone who isn't done with her life and venerable career.  But it gives some background and some insight as to where RBG comes from in the development of her ideals and what she'll do for them.  And it's not just her judicial background and time as a lawyer before that, but her life, too, and there were so many little anecdotes that you would never guess from just seeing RBG or reading her work.  Like her long, loving relationship with her husband, Marty, who cooked all the meals and who RBG once chased around her office with scissors, and who baked cakes for the clerks' birthdays at the Court.

I was surprised to learn a lot of the stuff behind RBG's professional life.  She's actually considered to be a very moderate justice, though she has a firm stance on equality, and is known to be one of the most thoughtful justices.  And then there's how she actually isn't a huge fan of Roe v. Wade; while she supports a woman's right to have an abortion, she felt that Roe didn't come in a great way, that it focuses on privacy rather than equality, and that sweeping decisions like Roe can ultimately be more easily disregarded later on--something that I think we've definitely seen in the recent spate of abortion regulations popping up across the countries which seemingly have nothing to do with actual health regulations.

However, I did have a few issues with this book.  First, it's very short, and consequently very surface-level.  While there are excerpts of some of her opinions that the authors dig into a bit, but I would have liked to see more analysis in general.  It also jumps around in time.  Just when I thought we were firmly into her life as a justice, there'd be a jump that would go back to when she was a lawyer and professor, and it was a bit confusing.  Those transitions also weren't very smooth.  And this is not a book meant to be read on Kindle--the formatting for it is absolutely terrible.

I really did enjoy this book, but I wish it had been a bit less superficial and that it just been organized a bit better.  Still, this offered a lot of snaps of RBG that I don't think most people know about, and they definitely made her more human rather than just the imposing (though tiny) justice who rules from the bench.

4 stars out of 5.

Assassins of the Turquoise Palace - Roya Hakakian

The biggest problem with Assassins of the Turquoise Palace is that I had no idea what it was about.  Having been raised in the good ol' US of A, I have been pretty much perpetually inundated with messages of "Iran is bad.  Bad bad bad."  While I doubt that's true in its entirety--few things ever are--there are a myriad of areas in which it does seem to have merit.  For example, the Iranian government's ordering of the killings in this book.  That wasn't exactly cool.  But what I was left wondering, for the entire book, was why it was ordered in the first place.  I think it had something to do with Kurds.  I don't know much about Kurds, pretty much just that they're a group of people in the Middle East who don't have a country of their own, much like the Roma, or the Jews before Israel was created, or the Palestinians today.  I don't know why the Iranian government wanted these particular Kurds dead.  Or were they Kurds?  Was that ever said?  I think it was mentioned that they supported an independent country for Kurdistan, but just because they supported it doesn't meant they were Kurds themselves.

You might see why this book left me a little confused.  Parts of the book also rambled or jumped around a bit too much; I have never seen more pagebreaks in my life, I swear!  It made following the multiple characters a little more difficult than I would have liked.

Also, despite the book being entitled Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, very little time is spent talking about the Turquoise Palace, the assassins, or even the assassination.  The focus is on the 90's-era trial of the men accused of killing several Iranian activists in Berlin.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love me a good trial.  I am an avid watcher of Law & Order (but only the episodes with McCoy, because he is a badass in the courtroom) and I take law classes for fun at my university.  And I do think that the trial and everything surrounding it was written very well, and was very easy to read; no slogging through legal mumbo-jumbo required.  But, if I'm picking up a book called Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, I really do expect the focus to be somewhat on the assassins.  I would have liked that story.  How did these people get to be killers, anyway?  It's entirely possible that book can't be written, because of a dearth of sources or something like that, but I think it would have been a more compelling read.  Not that a quest for justice is un-compelling, but... I don't know.  It just wasn't what I thought it was going to be, and what it was wasn't enough to make up for that.

One more thing.  While the writing is very detailed, which is what makes it so readable, I'm skeptical of how accurate it is.  Including dreams and feelings can be done in a nonfiction book through detailed interviews, but that would be very detailed indeed.  I'm skeptical if, at times, Hakakian isn't speculating and putting her own words or feelings into the mouths and hearts of the people of the book.

And can we talk about that cover for a second?  It  doesn't influence my opinion of the book, but man, that is some of the worst photo-editing I've ever seen.

So, lacking some information that made it a bit hard to understand, with a bit of a jumpy structure, it was a hard book to really get into.  While its actual topic was well-written, for the most part, it isn't a book I would pick up again.

2 stars out of 5.