An excellent discussion of election finance reform for policymakers and political watchers—though the audience may not...
Independent legal scholar Mutch (Campaigns, Congress and Courts: The Making of Federal Campaign Finance Law, 1988) contends that the Citizens United (2010) Supreme Court ruling has reversed more than 100 years of electoral reform and overthrown long-accepted legal definitions of equality, democracy and free speech.
The author contributes a broad perspective to the heated controversy provoked by the current Supreme Court and its decision that corporations can use their financial power to influence electoral outcomes—putting corporations on par with individual people. Mutch identifies two cycles of election finance reform: the first beginning around the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt and the second, with the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. Both, he shows, were driven by outrage over the role of money in politics. In the early 20th century, many feared the corrosive effects of large corporate financial contributions as undermining the notions of equality and democracy. Mutch quotes New Hampshire Sen. William Chandler, one of the founders of the Republican Party and co-sponsor of federal legislation to bring financial transparency to the electoral process: “A republic is supposed to be individual government….But when corporations can furnish money to carry elections from corporate treasuries individualism in government is gone.” Over the decades, the fears have prompted only partially successful legislative efforts. After Nixon, two 1970s cases—Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti—established money as a protected equivalent of human speech and permitted direct corporate funding of elections. “[T]racking changes in where campaign funds actually come from,” writes Mutch, “reveals that…today's system differs only in degree from the Gilded Age system the first reformers tried to uproot.”
An excellent discussion of election finance reform for policymakers and political watchers—though the audience may not include many general readers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-934000-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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