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THE CASE AGAINST LAWYERS

HOW THE LAWYERS, POLITICIANS, AND BUREACRATS HAVE TURNED THE LAW INTO AN INSTRUMENT OF TYRANNY--AND WHAT WE AS CITIZENS HAVE TO DO ABOUT IT

No raves for these rants.

A folksy screed by Court TV host Crier assailing today’s favorite targets: greedy, unprincipled lawyers; greedy, corrupt politicians; and greedy, self-serving bureaucrats.

Herself both a lawyer and journalist, Crier doesn’t like much about the two professions that have enriched her. The law, she says, has infected like a virulent virus every aspect of American life; the news media are more interested in revenues and ratings than in news. Crier trots out and bludgeons the usual suspects. We have too many rules and regulations, too many entitlements, too many lawsuits, too much political correctness. The public schools are awful. Government agencies have too much power. Criminals are too often portrayed as victims (the OJ acquittal was a bad thing). Hate crime legislation and mandatory minimum sentences and capital punishment are bad. Too much easy money corrupts politicians (the Enron situation is outrageous). Clinton shouldn’t have pardoned Marc Rich. Ross Perot was weird but prescient. Politicians don’t really want campaign finance reform. Class-action suits should be severely restricted. Lobbyists do everyone but themselves a disservice. We ought to lighten up on illegal drugs. It’s time we shouted “We’re not gonna take it any more!” and reclaimed our country. Crier’s language is as unexceptional as her theses. Clichés sprout like dandelions in the lawn of her just-plain-folks prose, and even in her most serious moments she cannot seem to locate a fresh phrase anywhere. (At the end, after she has presented her hopelessly impossible solutions to the messes she has described, she declares, “Only a change of heart can accomplish this.”) Crier describes herself as a compulsive clipper of periodicals, and indeed her book has a sort of scrapbook quality. It’s full of accounts of odd lawsuits and egregious offenses by her villains. But her decision not to cite sources is troubling, for she occasionally gets things wrong—e.g., she tells us that Shakespeare’s “belongings” were recently found; they weren’t.

No raves for these rants.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002

ISBN: 0-7679-0504-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Broadway

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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