The Persuasive Edge by Richard J. Crawford, Ph.D. and Charlotte A. Morris, M.A.

    The Persuasive Edge was a cool book about how to be persuasive to a judge or jury in trial, written by trial consultants who are experts in persuasion. There were a lot of really good lessons in it.

    For one, in a jury trial, an attorney needs to have a strategy that enables the person who agrees with him to make his case to those who don't. That means teaching the means of persuasion to those who are likely to use it to convince others. This means that a lot of the book, maybe a third or more, is about jury selection and developing the jury in voir dire. This is incredibly difficult, since selecting jurors based on how they answer questions relies on really good questions and very insightful understanding of the answers. The selection should start with knowledge of certain characteristics the attorney is looking for in jurors, and approach questioning in a funnel shape, starting broad, with open-ended questions, and working small, into more specific questions, before moving to another topic. At the end of questions, the lawyer can introduce the persuasion point, and try to develop connection with a juror that can be used in opening statement or closing argument, as well as in examination of witnesses. The book also talks about juror self-identity, and how a juror who sees herself as a leader is less likely to give in to another juror's opinion.

    The whole book is about entertainment. In discussing the opening statement, the authors say it's not best used as a time to preview the case, but as a time to sell the whole case, motivate the jury, and gain sympathy for your side. They emphasize using a narrative and making it interesting. In questioning witnesses, the sequence of events must be ordered to maximize the effect of the important part of the witness' testimony. The authors emphasize the anticlimactic over the climactic. Get the pivotal or essential point out early, and then fill in the background. Then, return to the most important thing to end the questioning. On cross-examination, let the members know that you are in control even when you're not. They tell the story of a lawyer who gets the opposite answer than they wanted, and instead of expressing shock, expresses a sense of victory, and declares, "Exactly!" and moves on to the next question quickly before anyone can realize the answer didn't help. That's a bold one. The authors come back to trust, competence, and likability. Everything a lawyer does in the courtroom should build or convey one of those three attributes. With the jurors believing that the lawyer is trustworthy, competent, and likable, they are more likely to find for their side. Moreover, that lawyer has hopefully used some of what the jurors said in voir dire to develop his or her themes for discussion of the case.

Miscellaneous:

• The authors point out that experts with experience in teaching are often the best at testifying in trial, when they need to teach the jury your view of the case.

Military Justice in America: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, 1775-1980 by Jonathan Lurie

    I was honestly very disappointed by this book. I was looking for a well-researched history of the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces with a focus on the development of the UCMJ and the case law of the court, but when I got was a history of the politics of political appointments. It was bizarre to me that Lurie would go through painstaking research, and obviously the book is well-researched, only to completely miss the forest for the trees. The interesting thing about CAAF isn't how Judge Latimer got appointed, the interesting thing about CAAF is how it developed jurisprudence out of a brand new code, the UCMJ, and had to do it to balance the needs of the military with the revolution that came with the UCMJ demanding that courts-martial be run like federal courts. Instead, Lurie focuses on minutiae that really don't matter.
     I found the discussion of Ansell and Crowder's debate within the Army JAG world about military justice during WWI to be interesting as a setup for the battles over the UCMJ in the 1940s, but Lurie was much more interested in personalities than policy. But I learned that without the movement that began with them, there really would not have been a true legal system in the military. Courts-martial were not really courts in any modern sense of the word until the UCMJ, since they didn't have judges, and often didn't even have lawyers. Lurie focuses in on the importance of appellate review: defendants didn't have recourse to appeal decisions to anyone but the JAG of his service, and then to the President. Creating CAAF was critical in ensuring real justice since there would be real review of the justice system. Ansell proposed obvious ideas like appointing a JAG for every general or special court-martial, and creating the basis for the modern Preliminary Hearing Officer/swearing to the charges with the concept that charges may not be referred without being reviewed for sufficiency by a competent JAG. 

    In the reforms that led to the UCMJ, Congress basically had six complaints post-WWII: the conviction rate was too high (88%), the punishments were excessive (resulting in reduction by later review boards in 75% of cases), there were wide discrepancies in punishments for the same offenses, rights of the accused were not protected during a court-martial proceeding, defense counsel was often incompetent, and sentences rendered by the court could be increased before the court-martial ended. These criticisms resulted from the increased scrutiny on military justice due to the massive exposure of Americans to military justice in WWII. During the war, over 1.7 million trials were held, more than a 100 executions were carried out, and 45,000 servicemembers were in prison at the end of the war. Above all, Americans were appalled by command influence corrupting courts-martial. Gerald Ford, who had been in the Navy during WWII, recalled sitting on boards where members asked "what's the Old Man [referring to the commander] want us to do? He testified to that effect while a Michigan congressman.

    The critical thing, Lurie points out, that developed military justice was not just the Code, but that the Code was paired with an appellate review process that could enforce the Code. CAAF has remained in a weird twilight zone as an Article I court with Article III properties, but has been critical in ensuring the administration of military justice in a way totally counter to the pre-Code era. I wish the book had focused more on how they actually did that.

Coming Into the Country by John McPhee

    This was not my favorite John McPheer book. I really liked The Control of Nature, Annals of the Former Earth, and Encounters with the Archdruid, but this one just didn't hit the same. I think that it could have been a lot shorter. McPhee starts with a section about rural Alaska, which was great. Then he moves on to Alaskan cities--not nearly as interesting. And then he moves on to the Alaskan wilderness, which was interesting, but is about three times as long as it needed to be. I like the early part of the book, when he is kayaking and canoeing down a river, but in the last section, he just spends all his time talking to the weirdo preppers in Eagle, Alaska. Otherwise, I don't have much to say. It's not a terrible book, but it was way below what I like from McPhee, and the part that I didn't like took up more than half the book.

On Xi Jinping by Kevin Rudd

    I had wanted to read this book for a long time, but it was a little dry and over my head. Rudd goes deep into Chinese Communist ideology, and it is incredibly well-researched, with hundreds of pages of endnotes. However, I'm not sure I needed that much. Not his fault. He even writes in the beginning a list of the chapters to skip if you're a person like me. But I thought I was different. I thought I was better than that. I was not. I could not follow all the Pekingology or really understand the importance of how many times Xi Jinping said the word "reform" in 2018 versus 2022. It was a lot to handle. Not gonna do a big post on this one. 

    

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

    This is a very dark book. I remember seeing No Country for Old Men when I was a kid, probably not long after it came out, and that Javier Bardem was terrifying as Anton Chigurh. I vividly remembered the first coin flip scene, and the scenes with Josh Brolin first out hunting and discovering the drug deal gone bad, as well as the first encounter between Chigurh and Moss.

    Reading the book, I think a few different motifs/themes are worth writing about. First, the news. Lots of different characters talk about how they can't watch the news anymore. It's part of a bigger theme about societal decline. It feels very different, tonally, from All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing that way, or at least different from my memory of those books. While all three portray Mexico as a wasteland forgotten by time, where it's just full of poverty and savagery, No Country was the first McCarthy book I read that romanticized the past. The book was written later, and is set later in time. McCarthy was older when he wrote it. But a big part of it is that between the 1940s and 1980s, the gap between All the Pretty Horses and No Country, drugs swept across America. At the same time, TV news brought stories of crime and death into peoples' homes every night.

    Another theme was aging and death. While the other McCarthy books featured young protagonists, neither Llewellyn Moss, nor Sheriff Bell, is young. Both are old, and both saw war in their younger days. The only real young characters are Carla Jean and the hitchhiker that Moss picks up towards the end. Everyone else is older. Lots of them are out of place in the world from being old, and being used to an easier time, with harder men. Sheriff Bell remembers how two generations before his, the men were much tougher from fighting Indians, and he doubts whether he is of their stock, or if he fits in better with new men, who are weaker. There's also a couple times where characters observe patterns in rocks chiseled by Native Americans and think about how someone could be so attached to the land to leave something there for eternity, with faith that nothing would ever change.

    Anton Chigurh is an appalling character. His cold brutality, from betting lives on a coin flip to killing people with a tool for killing cattle, contrasts with Sheriff Bell and Llewellyn Moss' sentimentality. McCarthy tells you what he thinks about sentimentality. Basically every character that does something nice is punished for it. When Moss brings water to a dying man, he's discovered by the cartel. When he spares Chigurh, he gets chased by him. When he tried to leave the money he found to Carla Jean, he dooms her. He picked up a hitchhiker, and died because Chigurh took her captive as a way to him. Meanwhile, Chigurh places to value on any life. He just flips a coin.

Exodus by Leon Uris

    I followed up Here Where We Live Is Our Country with Exodus, a completely different book. Uris tells the story of the founding of Israel and the aliyah of Jews across the world to Israel before and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The book certainly has a perspective. It is just as zionist as Here Where We Live is antizionist. I would say that Exodus is a better book in general, although I think it benefits from embracing historical fiction, written in a very compelling way, whereas Here Where We Live was stuck with real events and real people, and couldn't use fiction to fill gaps.

    My biggest criticism of Exodus is that it is just so cheesy. It is over the top in making the British characters half-Jewish, the Americans as big Israel-lovers, and the Israelis as the toughest men you've ever seen. Describing the main character, Ari Ben Canaan (later played by Paul Newman," his love interest, the American Kitty Fremont, says "This Ben Canaan doesn't act like any Jew I've ever met. You know what I mean. You don't particularly think of them in a capacity like his ... or fighters ... things of that sort." It perpetuates the classic propaganda of the Israelis saving the land from infertility and gets absolutely ridiculous in demonizing the Arabs, especially reaching the latter third or quarter of the book, when the Arab-Israeli war occurs. Uris notes that the Arabs are "experts in building on other people's civilizations" and had only built one city in a thousand years in Palestine. Sometimes it feels like Uris is criticizing Israel, but he mainly uses the Maccabees, a fictionalized version of Irgun or Lehi, to make that criticism, putting these words in the mouth of one: "Nothing we do, right or wrong, can ever compare to what has been done to the Jewish people." I would say that that group obviously gained a huge amount of power since the book was written. Certainly, modern-day Israeli lawmakers aren't often heard quoting fictional character Barak Ben Canaan: "International law is the thing which the evil ignore and the righteous refuse to enforce."

    What the book gets is that the formation of Israel was all about push factors from Europe. Middle Eastern Jews didn't found Israel because they weren't pushed there like European Jews were. The young sabras and immigrants to Israel are all pushed there by pogroms or the Holocaust, respectively. I think the story of Karen Hansen/Clement is very well told as a metaphor for the Jewish people. She is orphaned in Europe, and seeks out an adoptive family--Christians in Denmark. But she can never truly belong to them, and has to go in search of a new family in Europe. And she cannot even be adopted by Kitty Fremont, an American who wants to save her. She, and all of Israel, have to save themselves. I thought it was a little heavy-handed, like the rest of the book, but it was well-done. Uris made his point. 

    All in all, Exodus is a well-written and entertaining book, but it's propaganda value is a match for its entertainment value. It can be so over the top that, by the end, it took me out of the book because it was so unsubtle.

The American Revolution in Review

    I admit it! I got in over my head trying to read a bunch of books about the American Revolution in honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Here I am in August and I didn't finish everything I planned to read. Here are the books I read:

1. Crucible of War by Fred Anderson
2. American Revolutions by Alan Taylor
3. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn
4. The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood
5. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party by Alfred Young
6. A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
7. Ratification by Pauline Maier

And here are the articles I read:

1. A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers by Jonathan Mayhew
2. The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved by James Otis
3. The Rights of the Colonies Examined by Stephen Hopkins
4. Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament by Daniel Dulany
5. Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania by Jonathan Dickinson
6. Common Sense by Thomas Paine

I hit some kind of wall in May and ended up skipping these books:

1. American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan
2. The Creation of the American Republic by Gordon Wood
3. Shays' Rebellion by Leonard Richards
4. Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood
5. Liberty's Exiles by Maya Jasanoff
6. What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe

It wasn't really on my list, but James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic by Jack Rakove was a book I planned to add to the list before I hit the wall.

    I wish I had the mental energy to do a longer reflection on the significance of all this reading, but honestly, I don't. I am just going to link to my reflections of each book, and I'll say that Radicalism by Gordon Wood was the best, probably followed by the Alan Taylor and Pauline Maier books.