A crisp, colorful examination of the case that established the formidable power of the federal judiciary.
Former Supreme Court clerk and Slate publisher Sloan and veteran political aide McKean (co-authors: Tommy the Cork: Washington’s Ultimate Insider from Roosevelt to Reagan, 2003) bring to life one of the most important legal cases in American history.
In 1801 William Marbury filed suit to compel Jefferson’s Secretary of State James Madison to deliver the commission, signed and sealed by former President John Adams, naming Marbury a justice of the peace in the District of Columbia. Writing for the entire court, the Adams-appointed Chief Justice John Marshall concluded that Marbury’s commission had been completed, that the executive branch in its ministerial capacity was susceptible to suit and that the law had been broken. After slapping the Republicans Jefferson and Madison, the Federalist Marshall then avoided a confrontation with the powerful new president by stunningly declaring unconstitutional the congressional statute giving the court jurisdiction. This apparently self-denying ruling supplied no relief for Marbury, but it established the judiciary as the final arbiter of any conflict between the law and the Constitution. In one stroke Marshall elevated the least significant of the three branches of government, enhancing the prestige of a formerly weak institution. Marbury v. Madison arose in the wake of the death of Washington, the country’s only truly unifying figure, and the first contested election in the nation’s history, bitterly waged between the nationalist Federalists and the Republicans. Sloan and McKean supply Marbury’s historical context and unravel the complex fabric of personalities, politics and law that animated the case. After Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education—and maybe Dred Scott and Bush v. Gore—few Americans can explain even a single case from the country’s highest court. The authors’ enthusiasm and clear prose vivify the contention that, as Marshall said, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
A crisp, colorful examination of the case that established the formidable power of the federal judiciary.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-426-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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