68 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JANUARY 27, 2020
Review_NONFICTION
★ Nobody’s Child:
A Tragedy, a Trial, and a
History of the Insanity Defense
Susan Nordin Vinocour. Norton, $28.95
(336p) ISBN 978-0-393-65192-8
As Vinocour, a clinical and forensic
psychologist, writes in this moving, well-
researched account of the insanity defense,
she really didn’t want to get involved in
the case of the woman she calls Dorothy
Dunn, a poor black woman with mental
health issues accused of killing her three-
year-old grandson, but she agreed to do a
psych evaluation. Vinocour, herself a
victim of child abuse, was skeptical at first
that Dunn wasn’t guilty. But through the
course of the evaluation, she came to
realize Dunn wasn’t competent to stand
trial for second-degree murder because
she was not coherent; despite Vinocour’s
testimony, the jury disagreed, and the
woman was sentenced to 25 years to life.
Vinocour explains that the insanity defense
is rarely used because it’s too difficult to
explain to a jury. She also examines cases
showing the history of the plea, including
that of the man who tried to assassinate
Andrew Jackson in 1835, one of the few
times the defense worked, and that of
Daniel M’Naghten, who tried to assassi-
nate the British prime minister in 1843.
M’Naghten’s insanity plea was denied,
however, because the law proved that he
knew, but did not understand, the act was
wrong. And that was what ultimately
doomed Dunn, whose sad story constitutes
more than half the book. Vinocour does a
fine job explaining the defense in layman’s
terms. Sterling prose helps make this a
page-turner. Agent: Jennifer Herrera, David
Black Agency. (Mar.)Mayday 1971: A White House at
War, a Revolt in the Streets, and
the Untold Story of America’s
Biggest Mass Arrest
Lawrence Roberts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
$28 (464p) ISBN 978-1-328-76672-4
Journalist Roberts debuts with a vivid
and deeply sourced account of the events
leading up to and following the May 1971
mass arrest of more than 12,000 antiwar
protesters by Washington, D.C., police
acting in concert with Richard Nixon’s
White House. Though demonstrators
failed to achieve their goal of shutting
down the federal government in order toforce an end to the Vietnam War, “the les-
sons of Mayday restored the right of dis-
sent to the streets of Washington,” Roberts
writes. He chronicles the “Spring
Offensive,” as
organizers called
it, from the
Weather
Underground’s
March 1971
bombing of the
U.S. Capitol,
through the
April encamp-
ment of antiwar
veterans in West
Potomac Park, to the traffic blockades and
other acts of civil disobedience that
occurred from May 1 to May 6. Profiling
protest leaders, as well as public defenders
and police officials who protected the rule
of law against Nixon’s anti-Mayday “war
council,” Roberts convincingly argues that
the White House’s authoritarian attitudes
and actions foreshadowed the Watergate
scandal. Readers with an interest in protest
movements, the history of Washington,
D.C., and 1960s and ’70s counterculture
will be rewarded by this comprehensive
and accessible account. Agent: Gail Ross, the
Ross Yoon Agency. (Mar.)The Myth of Chinese Capitalism:
The Worker, the Factory, and the
Future of the World
Dexter Roberts. St. Martin’s, $28.99 (288p)
ISBN 978-1-250-08937-3
Journalist Roberts blends economic
analysis with human-interest reporting in
this probing and accessible examination
of the current state of the Chinese economy.
Profiling migrant workers from the
impoverished southwestern province of
Guizhou, Roberts illustrates the hardships
faced by hundreds of millions of rural
Chinese who left home for factory jobs in
coastal cities over the past two decades.
Tight controls over the residence permit
system that confers education, housing,
legal, and social service benefits made these
migrant workers second-class citizens in
factory cities such as Dongguan, Roberts
explains, though many were willing to
accept “meager wages and poor working
conditions” in exchange for the promise
of material prosperity. The Communist
Party’s “bargain of continued economicgrowth in return for political acquiescence”
is under threat, however, as large-scale
shifts in labor and export markets,
wrongheaded developmental policies, and
President Xi Jinping’s “sweeping crack-
down on civil society” have pushed these
workers’ resentments to unstable levels.
Roberts carefully documents growing
unrest over unpaid wages and “arbitrary”
government land seizures and writes
movingly of factory workers and rural
villagers struggling with the disconnect
between what they were promised and
what they’ve been able to achieve. The
result is a clearheaded and persuasive
counter-narrative to the notion that the
Chinese economic model is set to take
over the world. Readers looking for an
informed and nuanced perspective on
modern China will find it here. (Mar.)Post Wall, Post Square: How
Bush, Gorbachev, Kohl, and Deng
Shaped the World after 1989
Kristina Spohr. Yale Univ., $40 (784p)
ISBN 978-0-300-23382-7
In this painstakingly researched history,
Johns Hopkins University global affairs
professor Spohr (The Global Chancellor)
dissects international relations during the
“hinge years” of 1989–1992 to understand
“why a durable and apparently stable world
order collapsed” and how “a new order was
improvised out of its ruins.” Spohr draws
on recently declassified and “neglected
documents” to investigate the dismantling
of the U.S.S.R., Germany’s swift reunifi-
cation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
evolution of NATO, the establishment of
the European Union, and the formation
of the international coalition behind
Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. Though
she seeks to explicitly connect these and
other matters to China’s Tiananmen Square
uprising in 1989 and the “false dawn” of
Japan’s geopolitical influence, the book’s
primary focus is on U.S., Soviet, and
European relations. Spohr favors localized
deep dives—into the generational divide
within Hungary’s Communist Party
leadership, for example—over broad
overviews, giving the book an impressive
level of detail but a somewhat repetitive
feel. She precisely captures individual
personalities (George H.W. Bush “seemed
a politician in flux”; German chancellor
Helmut Kohl was willing to make fun of