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Title details for The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin - Available

The Nine

Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

by Jeffrey Toobin
Don Leslie
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the Supreme Court and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land.

Just in time for the 2008 presidential election–where the future of the Court will be at stake–Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of conservative disgust with the Court have finally produced a conservative majority, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.
Based on exclusive interviews with the justices themselves, THE NINE tells the story of the Court through personalities–from Anthony Kennedy’s overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas’s well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter’s odd nineteenth-century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the-scenes story of Bush v. Gore–and Sandra Day O’Connor’s fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office.
THE NINE is the book Toobin was born to write. He is a bestselling author, a CNN senior legal analyst, and New Yorker staff writer. No one is more superbly qualified to profile the nine justices.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    September 18, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415942352
      • File size: 458860 KB
      • Duration: 15:55:57

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Toobin's take on the nine people who sit on the nation's highest court is intimate, personal, and vital. He focuses mostly on the personalities in the Rehnquist Court and the current Roberts Court, showing how character, background, and political philosophy influence the decisions made by the Court on the great issues like civil rights, presidential powers, church-state relations, and the defining issue of the past thirty years--abortion. Don Leslie reads Toobin's complex analyses of the justices with feeling and understanding, neither exaggerating nor minimizing the issues. He is faithful to the author's affection for certain justices--O'Connor, Souter, and Rehnquist--while being respectful of his antipathy to others. Behind-the-scenes struggles, such as Bush v. Gore, are explored in detail, because they affect the future and because, though changes in the Court's direction are snail slow, they ultimately define the United States' role in the world. P.E.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • AudioFile Magazine
      This book is Toobin's commentary on the evolution of the Supreme Court from the Reagan administration onward. He starts from what has been characterized as a liberal court, moves to a court that moderates held in check, and ends with the current court ands its decidedly conservative bias. Toobin's reading and writing styles reflect a fascination with the personalities of the justices (some more than others), the politics within the court, and the effect of both on some of the most important decisions of recent years. His narrative style is first newsy, then intense and scholarly, then amused. The abridgment is relatively smooth. J.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 9, 2007
      It’s not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker
      legal writer Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson
      ) surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter Sandra Day O’Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees as an “almost primal” attunement to a middle-of-the-road public consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist and Scalia ended up bitter old men, their rigorous constitutional doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates’ compromises. The author deftly distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court’s internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials (“inept and unsavory” is his verdict on the Court’s intervention in the 2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court right in the thick of American life. (A final chapter and epilogue on the 2006–2007 term, with new justices Roberts and Alito, was unavailable to PW
      .)

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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