Pulitzer-winner Garrow (Bearing the Cross, 1986, etc.) offers a vast and ponderous narrative history of the 50-year struggle to establish abortion rights. Garrow's long story begins in 1920's Connecticut with the establishment of the Connecticut Birth Control League and its battle for birth-control rights. Using an 1879 state law prohibiting the use of contraceptive devices, Connecticut authorities attempted to close down clinics operated by the League, ultimately persuading the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1940 to uphold the statute. Garrow then recounts both political and legal battles by birth-control proponents to change the law. In 1961, the US Supreme Court decided Poe v. Ullman, a collusive suit in which two married couples claimed they had sought contraceptive advice from a physician who had withheld his advice for fear of prosecution. By one vote, the Court decided that since there was no immediate threat of prosecution, it would decline to decide the case. Encouraged by the closeness of the vote, birth-control forces now tried a direct challenge to the Connecticut law. The result was Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Supreme Court finally struck down the Connecticut law as unconstitutional, basing its analysis on a previously unarticulated constitutional ``right to privacy.'' As Garrow shows, Griswold's privacy doctrine had far- reaching implications: it became the basis for challenging anti- abortion laws not just in Connecticut but throughout the country. Garrow tells of the long political battles to legalize abortion, of the first abortion cases in 1969, and, finally, of Roe v. Wade itself; here, basing its analysis on the privacy right it found in Griswold, the Court found a federal constitutional right to abortion. Finally, Garrow covers post-Roe privacy cases, as well as judicial and legislative attempts to chip away at the privacy doctrine. His account culminates in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), with the Supreme Court reaffirming Roe, seemingly for good. Exhaustive and exhausting.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-542755-5
Page Count: 942
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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