A hard-hitting polemic from the left, timed to coincide with the opening of the Court’s next term.
A constitutional lawyer argues that since the Republican platform of 1964, the conservative movement has succeeded in altering basic precepts of constitutional law, not just through the policies of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and the two Bushes, but through Supreme Court decisions.
Chemerinsky, the founding dean of the University of California Irvine Law School and author of multiple legal texts (Enhancing Government: Federalism for the 21st Century, 2008, etc.), pulls no punches in charging that the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are activists driven by ideology in such matters as public education, affirmative action, presidential power, separation of church and state, individual liberties, rights to punitive damages, access to the courts and the rights of criminal defendants. To demonstrate how this shift affects individual lives, the author cites cases in each of these areas, many of which he participated in and lost as a pro bono lawyer in federal courts of appeal and before the Supreme Court. The cases include ordinary citizens in extraordinary circumstances: a man serving a life sentence for stealing videotapes from a store under California’s “three strikes” law; a man seeking punitive damages after his family was destroyed in the rollover of a Ford Bronco; a man seeking an injunction against police chokeholds after he was injured by one. Chemerinsky was also involved in more prominent cases, including the suit in the Florida courts following the disputed 2000 presidential election and the Valerie Plame case. While acknowledging that the Court’s shift to the right is likely to continue for decades, given the life tenure of justices, he believes that the pendulum will eventually swing back. The author contends that to bring about change in the composition of the Court it is essential to recognize that justices are not umpires but makers of value judgments and that the judicial confirmation process must include questions that reveal a nominee’s ideology and values and denies confirmation to those who do not answer such questions.
A hard-hitting polemic from the left, timed to coincide with the opening of the Court’s next term.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7468-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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