Book Review Shining City
Book: Shining
City
Author: Tom Rosenstiel
Publisher: HarperCollins
Re-inventing the wheel is pointless. Therefore, let the author, Tom Rosenstiel, set the table for Shining City, set in Washington D.C., a city of auto traders, trading new, used, re-furbished and stolen political vehicles.
“The Constitution says the president nominates justices and the Senate confirms them. The problem is that everyone else feels they should have a say in picking the next justice.” P. 27.
The author gave these words to James Barlow Nash, the
fictitious U.S. president, who obviously doesn’t like the ‘everyone else’ part
of deciding who should be a Supreme Court judge.
Nash has a nominee, but his choice won’t get that far if he fails public scrutiny, staged on television cameras, baby cameras and social media. He then hires Peter Rena and Randi Brooks, owners of a political babysitting company - for lack of a better word - to vet his choice, Judge Roland Madison.
He is on the same page with President Nash. Madison doesn’t believe in the ‘everyone else’ aspect of the nomination process and calls it a creation of television. This pits Madison against Rena and Brooks, whose job description includes coaching him for the media and Senate Committee’s de-layering.
Madison might not like it, but readers will, especially readers who do not live in the U.S. because it gently maps out what nominees go through to be Supreme Court justices. Rena and Brooks are not picture perfect themselves and that helps the reader better understand the political landscape of Democrats and Republicans.
The book is about ‘everyone else’ which explains characters that represent Washington lobby groups. That was hard to follow and needs paging back to remember if a character is a journalist or conservative lobbyist. Dropping one wouldn’t have hurt the story.
Shining City has the perfect ten when it comes to what is, and what ought to be. The U.S. Constitution. That is what is. What ought to be is personal and financial. What we have here is what I call a second helping book, where certain things linger on, prompting a re-read.
It is also a breath of fresh air because it has Hallie Jobe, a former FBI agent with a law degree, working with Rena and Brooks. She is African American.
It is unusual to find novels without black characters inspired by the evening’s headlines: drivers, maids, welfare mothers, poverty (a universal human condition labelled as purely black), dead beat dads, drug addicts and most recently, in a book by an Asian American author, black men’s perceived physiology.
This is unfortunate because they were lynched in the South at the height of Jim Crow and are still murdered today for what the world thinks they have.
Nonqaba waka Msimang is the author of Sweetness the novel.
Author: Tom Rosenstiel
Publisher: HarperCollins
Re-inventing the wheel is pointless. Therefore, let the author, Tom Rosenstiel, set the table for Shining City, set in Washington D.C., a city of auto traders, trading new, used, re-furbished and stolen political vehicles.
“The Constitution says the president nominates justices and the Senate confirms them. The problem is that everyone else feels they should have a say in picking the next justice.” P. 27.
The author gave these words to James Barlow Nash, the
fictitious U.S. president, who obviously doesn’t like the ‘everyone else’ part
of deciding who should be a Supreme Court judge.Nash has a nominee, but his choice won’t get that far if he fails public scrutiny, staged on television cameras, baby cameras and social media. He then hires Peter Rena and Randi Brooks, owners of a political babysitting company - for lack of a better word - to vet his choice, Judge Roland Madison.
He is on the same page with President Nash. Madison doesn’t believe in the ‘everyone else’ aspect of the nomination process and calls it a creation of television. This pits Madison against Rena and Brooks, whose job description includes coaching him for the media and Senate Committee’s de-layering.
Madison might not like it, but readers will, especially readers who do not live in the U.S. because it gently maps out what nominees go through to be Supreme Court justices. Rena and Brooks are not picture perfect themselves and that helps the reader better understand the political landscape of Democrats and Republicans.
The book is about ‘everyone else’ which explains characters that represent Washington lobby groups. That was hard to follow and needs paging back to remember if a character is a journalist or conservative lobbyist. Dropping one wouldn’t have hurt the story.
Shining City has the perfect ten when it comes to what is, and what ought to be. The U.S. Constitution. That is what is. What ought to be is personal and financial. What we have here is what I call a second helping book, where certain things linger on, prompting a re-read.
It is also a breath of fresh air because it has Hallie Jobe, a former FBI agent with a law degree, working with Rena and Brooks. She is African American.
It is unusual to find novels without black characters inspired by the evening’s headlines: drivers, maids, welfare mothers, poverty (a universal human condition labelled as purely black), dead beat dads, drug addicts and most recently, in a book by an Asian American author, black men’s perceived physiology.
This is unfortunate because they were lynched in the South at the height of Jim Crow and are still murdered today for what the world thinks they have.
Nonqaba waka Msimang is the author of Sweetness the novel.
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