Even so, anyone interested in either side of the divisive Second Amendment debate will profit from reading this...
A collection of scholarly legal and historical essays that unanimously dispute the credibility of individualist interpretations of the Second Amendment.
His numerous law review articles on the subject made Bogus (Law/Roger Williams College of Law) a natural choice to assemble this compilation of ten important articles about the American right to bear arms. The essays, by distinguished scholars like Pulitzer Prize–winning Jack Rakove, collectively argue that historians and lawyers who interpret the Second Amendment as protection of the individual citizen’s right to own firearms do so only by twisting historical facts. Bogus’s introduction maintains that the individualist interpretation of the amendment did not gain academic or legal respectability until late in the 20th century. A closer inspection of these individualist arguments, he asserts, establishes that the framers of the Constitution clearly intended the Second Amendment to protect a state militia’s check on potential misuse of the federal standing army. Other contributors offer different perspectives on this same basic interpretation. Steven J. Heyman contests the idea that the amendment protects a natural right to rebellion; Lois Schwoerer challenges the argument that British legal precedent provides a foundation for the individual right to bear arms; Michael Dorf notes both how little historical evidence supports the individualist argument and how it has become constitutionally meaningless for 21st-century America. Since all the impressive scholarship on display builds from the same basic hypothesis, however, it becomes increasingly redundant. The narrow focus on historical considerations ultimately raises suspicions that this tendentious volume protests too much.
Even so, anyone interested in either side of the divisive Second Amendment debate will profit from reading this collection—the pro-gun audience to approach their argument more thoughtfully, the anti-gun people to acquire fresh ammunition for their views.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-699-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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