Though Neuborne’s thoughts on the Mueller Report are already out of date, he provides timely, frightening, and, hopefully,...
A veteran civil liberties lawyer delivers the sobering message that “there is no constitutional mechanic in the sky ready to swoop down and save American democracy from Donald Trump at the head of a populist mob. The fate of American democracy is up to us.”
Neuborne (Civil Liberties/New York Univ. School of Law; Madison’s Music: On Reading the First Amendment, 2015, etc.), who has been a part of more than 200 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and has sued every president since Lyndon Johnson, draws on his decades of experience to discuss the depths of today’s political threats. Most disturbing is the second chapter, in which the author points to the influence of Hitler on the current president’s penchant for “demagogic manipulation.” From “fake news” and promises to restore greatness, many similarities are too close for comfort. Most readers are already cognizant of the current situation, but Neuborne provides a helpful legal view of what could happen in the future. The author examines two kinds of “brakes” in our political system: internal electoral brakes and external judicial brakes, both of which are under siege. His solutions are difficult but doable. He really lets loose on the Supreme Court, noting that with the newest judges, we should obviously expect more right-leaning decisions in the years to come. The author also shows how Republican judges favor the autonomy of the strong over equality of the weak and how the Constitution’s purposeful ambiguity continues to confuse. Even the drafters of the Constitution couldn’t agree on the meanings of certain passages. Neuborne sees how different readings and interpretations of the Constitution will always cause problems. The Constitution is not above politics; it is often shaped by it. As the narrative morphs into a Supreme Court history, the author points out any number of possible events that have affected the court’s decisions and our lives.
Though Neuborne’s thoughts on the Mueller Report are already out of date, he provides timely, frightening, and, hopefully, galvanizing reading.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-358-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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