Fascinating book but too many mispronunciations

Dear Audible: Please use your influence with audiobooks producers to ensure that narrators get basic pronunciations right. I enjoyed Larry Herron's warm and clear voice, but he mispronounced way too many words. For example, "peremptory" was repeatedly pronounced "pre-emptory," "mores" was pronounced phonetically, and a number of fairly common names were mispronounced. While this might not be a big deal to some, it's fingernails across a chalkboard to me and suggests a lack of care. It also sometimes sends me running to the dictionary to make sure I haven't been mispronouncing those words all these years. IMO, mispronounced words/names in an audiobook are about as bad as misspellings in print books. Come on, man!

That said, I appreciate Audible's providing a PDF of footnotes and I hope it will be better about including notes and visual materials that have not been included with many other audiobooks.

As to the content of the book, I've always been interested in what fuels Thomas' unconventional and sometimes ugly jurisprudence. Mainly using Thomas' speeches, articles, and opinions, Robin sets out some provocative but well-supported theories. In Robin's view, Thomas is intent on destroying liberal remedies to racial injustice because they only exacerbate the problem. As one remedy, Thomas generalizes his grandfather's response to racism by being a good capitalist and patriarch as the prescription for how all other black people (or black males) should conduct themselves, apparently without much regard for their own widely varying circumstances. As Robin puts it, "At the heart of Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence, then, is a belief that the market is effective and politics is pointless." That's actually a relatively tame notion of Robin's and there's much more; please read reviews such as those in the NYT and NR for far better analyses.

Thomas' life story is in some ways compelling and his views are important in the debate on race, but AFAIC, it's a shame that someone with such a bleak and severe outlook on race, law, and society is sitting on our Supreme Court. Though I'm not entirely sold on Robin's views, this book is engaging, informative and very readable (or listenable) given the sometimes complex subject matter.

8 people found this helpful

Wow! Unbelievably thorough and "squarely" written

The narration was excellent. "Race, Capitolsm, and Constitution" each showcases man and the United States tension and battle to contain nature and man/societies existence within that nature.

2 people found this helpful

interesting biography pp

Enjoyed the presentation, just thought there should be a little more context given to Thomas's ideas.

interesting and vital

really fascinating biography and analysis of a person and politics I (and I assume many others) had little understanding of before. Corey's suggestion that we interrogate the premises and assumptions he lays out in Thomas's politics which the left often shares is especially urgent and compelling

Finished it in a single day!

A fascinating if unnerving intellectual biography. I will read Thomas' court decisions in a different light from this point onward.

Legalese

I am not disappointed with the substance or the book's theses. I do think it may be inaccessible to those who don't have political science or law degrees or are law students. Had Robin gone to the trouble to offer some interpretations here and again, it would have been so much more.

Further, the narrator regularly mispronounces words. It's like reading a print book with multiple misspellings.

1 person found this helpful

The single worst book ever written.

This book is nothing more than propaganda, full of lies and ignominious statements about Clarence Thomas. The performance is amateur at best, and the book was written poorly. The author should be ashamed of this body of work.

5 people found this helpful

The Enigma Black Militant or Conservative?

1st look ever at ABM (Angry Black Man) as conflicted as I am. The difference is Justice Thomas is in a position to make meaningful changes... Where I am not but we both lost in the terrain in front of us! 1st time i had an Auditable book filled with so many dead air space.