This sweeping history of the Supreme Court will thoroughly aggravate anyone who believes, along with Robert Bork or Justice Antonin Scalia that the Constitution should be read narrowly. Irons (Political Science/Univ. of California, San Diego; May It Please the Court: The First Amendment, 1997, etc.) makes no bones about his ideological stance. To him, the Constitution must be construed in the context of an evolving nation. Not surprisingly, former Justice William Brennan —remains my judicial ideal and inspiration.— Irons is at his best when he focuses on those litigants before the Court who were outsiders seeking empowerment: people like Fred Korematsu, who challenged the evacuation of Japanese-Americans during WWII, or Homer Plessy, who in 1892 had the audacity to ride in a Louisiana railroad car reserved for white passengers. The decision to explain the Supreme Court and its evolving doctrines through the stories of those whose cases generated rulings that subsequently affected every citizen makes the book accessible to nonlawyers who have a general interest in legal history. This may be why the chapters that trace the early years of the court make for slow going: the —little guy— litigants with whom Irons identifies are missing, and instead we are left slogging through rehashed material. Finally, while Irons is unabashed about his viewpoint, this candor does nothing to assure readers new to the subject that they are getting the whole, if partisan, story. Irons has a disquieting habit of using loaded adjectives and verbs when describing the thoughts of those justices with whom he disagrees. Thus, Felix Frankfurter —pontificates— and gives a —civics lecture— in an opinion that Irons views as wrongheaded, and he barely conceals his disdain for justices, like William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas, on the other side of the ideological debate. Irons is preaching to the choir. While his history contains a few great stories, it will change no minds. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-87006-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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