Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality - Debbie Cenziper, Jim Obergefell

There's a few things that I love the come together in Love Wins. 

1) The Law - it's not perfect but it's ours and in some respects it gives people who would otherwise be disenfranchised, power to make real and lasting change (but also see Dred Scott v. Sandford ugh). 

2) Narrative nonfiction - I love journalism that is told like a story. And this is done so well in podcasts but sometimes gets very very dry in book form. Not this one. This one was intriguing and moving and very well put together. 

3) Cincinnati - my hometown with all its warts and problems still feels special to me now that I am far away with no reason to return. 

4) LOVE - In 2004, I angrily stared at my absentee ballot from Ohio. Wondering how it was possible that a constitutional amendment proposing targeted discrimination was even considered. But it was. And it passed. The idea, the simple idea that you meet someone, you fall in love, and you decide you want to spend the rest of your life with someone - make a symbolic commitment - is really not that hard to understand. The fact that two people of the same sex want to do this is irrelevant to the inquiry. Or it should be. 

I didn't know John Arthur and James Obergefell's story. How they met, fell in love, and committed to each other over and over, until after the Windsor case, decided to get married, even in the midst of John's battle with ALS. Having read Every Note Played by Lisa Genova this year (read that review here), ALS is something I feel I'm more familiar with than ever before. Understanding the creeping devastation and loss it requires of its afflicted day after day. 

Most of all, the Obergefell v. Hodges is a love letter, a legacy, from James to John every day and into the annals of history. And that is beautiful.

Also, hat tip to narrator George Newbern who is an excellent audio book reader. 

4/5 Stars. 

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis - J.D. Vance

"There's something powerful about realizing that you've undersold yourself. That somehow your mind confused effort for a lack of ability." - JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Now compare that with this:

"Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It's vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear." - Michelle Obama, Becoming

It's not lost on me that I was reading both of these books at the same time and finding raw similarities with the struggles and experiences of Michelle Obama and JD Vance. It's interesting actually, how much in common poor white working class neighborhoods have in common with poor minority urban neighborhoods. This is something that was not lost on Vance, who says while he was in high school and college, would read books and studies on the problems of people living below the poverty line. And even though the books and studies focused on urban areas and struggles, he recognized and identified those issues even in his own life and community. That these two people, JD Vance and Michelle Obama, could grow up in under served and underrepresented neighborhoods, advance to Ivy League law schools (Yale and Harvard respectively) and come out with such divergent politics to solve the problems they identified in their communities is an interesting look at American politics and likely the role of race in modern America.

I was really intrigued reading Hillbilly Elegy. Let's not make a mistake in thinking that JD Vance is writing a book aimed at analyzing or solving the problems of white working class America. This is first and foremost a memoir. It seeks firstly to tell the story of JD Vance and his family. The struggles they endured and the legacy issues passed down for generations in his family. He struggled, he survived, he got out, and he was lucky. And he knows it. And there's something satisfying about that because he did work hard but he only knew what he knew. 

Unable to wade through the confusing and never ending trail of paperwork required to receive tuition assistance, Vance joined the Marine Corps and came out four years later smarter and more equipped to tackle the enrollment challenges of a four-year college. He also came out with a wider network of experience through support from his Marine Corps family. It really cannot be stressed enough that we don't know what we don't know and sometimes those barriers are the most important ones for people trying to rise up out of a terrible situation and cycle of poverty. 

Vance says, "Social capital isn't manifest only in someone connecting you to a friend or passing a resume on to an old boss. It is also, or perhaps primarily, a measure of how much we learn from our friends, colleagues, and mentors." The raw truth is that people who live in communities stuck in cycles of poverty, violence, drug abuse, etc. have very little social capital to make a change for themselves. And then are blamed for not taking advantage of opportunities they couldn't even begin to comprehend existed for them. 

I grew up only 18 miles from JD Vance's childhood hometown of Middletown, Ohio. I too referred to it as Middle-tucky. A derogatory term meant to express the lack of education or "sophistication" of the inhabitants. (What can I say, kids are assholes). And I know precisely the kind of lethargy surrounding communities that see no possibility of getting ahead, and so just stop trying. I don't have the answers on how to fix that, and neither does Vance. He's not a sociologist, psychologist, urban planner, community organizer, or any of those things. He's a guy with a story.

Downtown Middletown Ohio via drone. via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qAzcuEZGOc

I can see why the media took this story and tried to make it out to be some kind of insight to the Trump Train mentality. I get it. I see the people he describes as left behind. He talks explicitly at having sympathy for them, but also does not excuse their own behavior which contributes to their plight. But this book is not an explanation of the Trump phenomenon. It can't be. It's one man's story of his childhood trauma and struggles. And he makes no attempt to make that broader leap. 

That Vance was criticized by the both right and left for some of the things said in his story is not surprising there's plenty for both here to get dug in about. But I prefer to just look at this as one man's story. And I prefer to just take that as it is and offer him the simple respect of accepting his truth as he tells it. He's the one that lived it in any case. I owe him that much. That's as much as we owe each other at least.

3 3/4 Stars.

Notorious RBG - Irin Carmon, Shana Knizhnik

Let’s be clear, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) gets all the stars. I hope I’m 1/4 as smart and 1/2 as fun as she is. This book only gets 4 stars because it could have been so much deeper. 

Ostensibly written by two millennial super fans of RBG, the book riffs on the memes that have developed on Tumblr and elsewhere to acknowledge RBG’s capturing of the cultural imagination. This book explores RBG’s life from a starting point of the zeitgeist rather than the law. Having gone to law school and read her writings from time to time to time to time, I would have liked a little more legal-nerd gratification. 

She’s a very fascinating person who somehow managed to have a really loving and balanced marriage to boot. I passed “impressed” as a reaction we’ll within the first chapter. As the Supreme Court nominations get increasingly political and polarized, I’m saddened to think such great legal minds may not get a chance to sit on the court.

4/5 Stars. 

The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan - Laurence Leamer

I went to law school so the words "Epic Courtroom Battle" were sure to catch my eye. And since I went to law school I am aware that there is such a thing as the Southern Poverty Law Center. And I live in America and am aware that lynching was a terrible crime against people of color, mostly in the American South, during the civil rights movement and before. So the most shocking thing in reading this book, was the fact that the lynching in question, the lynching that launched the epic courtroom battle mentioned, happened in Mobile, Alabama in 1981. 

Yep, 1981. I was actually alive that year and while I don't remember it at all, it's shocking and heartbreaking and maddening that a lynching happened in America in my lifetime. Michael Donald was 19 years old when he had the misfortune of walking down the street in Alabama by himself at night, where he was approached by Tiger Knowles and Henry Hayes. He was beaten, choked, and had his throat slashed before he was thrown in the trunk of a car, driven to Mobile, and hung from a tree. 

That Knowles and Hayes were KKK members shouldn't be surprising. And that Mobile authorities did little to investigate and solve the crime shouldn't be surprising either. Leamer's tale takes us up through the end of Knowles and Hayes' criminal trials. Trials which would not have happened without Michael Figures and other members of the federal Department of Justice. Then Morris Dees, chief trial attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center, gets wind of the case and knows he is going to use the lynching to bring down the United Klans of America (UKA) and its leader Robert Shelton. 

Dees, it seems, knows racists from experience. Growing up in Alabama, Dees attended U of A and worked on George Wallace's gubernatorial campaign in college. Although Dees would graduate from law school, he focused his work on a mail order publishing business he started with a partner in college. After both finding they were unfulfilled with the business world, Dees and Fuller sell off their company and go their separate ways. Dees goes on to found the SPLC and Fuller begins Habitat for Humanity. 

Dees evolution into a crusader against the UKA was a gradual process and by the time the civil trial starts, he's been trying and winning civil rights cases for some time. He definitely marches to his own drummer and does things his own way, but Dees had a singular purpose in this case, and that was to bring down the UKA in such a way that could be used in the future against other violent hate groups. 

The best parts of the book, to me, were the background information regarding the civil rights movement and the campaigns of George Wallace. The courtroom battle fell a little short of "epic" to me, but Leamer is not an attorney himself and since most of the defendants were representing themselves, I doubt they produced many quotable arguments. 

I picked up this book as my non-fiction selection for Black History Month. I may not have finished it in February, but I'm glad I read it.

4/5 Stars.