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
An absorbing study of the role of style and design in early postwar American culture. Marling (Art History and American Studies/ Univ. of Minnesota; coauthor of Iwo Jima: Monuments and the American Hero, 1991) examines the period when TV first leveled its electronic gaze at American life and a dynamic new set of visual and cultural values were born. She describes leisure pursuits like amateur painting— and its ghastly derivative, the paint-by-numbers set—that rose with the country's self-conscious new prosperity; the growth of automobile fetishism; kitchen gadgets and their meaning for ever- busier women; Elvis's nouveau-riche stylistic pretensions; and national unease over the comparative worth of less frivolous Soviet accomplishments. The book begins slowly, detailing the national obsession with Mamie Eisenhower's hair and clothing, but gathers momentum in describing Disneyland's antecedents, the psychosexual lure of chrome-laden cars, and the growing hegemony of design over function in the development of American products. Marling writes with flair, and her text engages the reader even when profound insight is lacking. Readers may disagree with her on occasion (that ``the French [fashion] salon is a woman's place, ultimately governed by her preferences and skills'' seems debatable). And sometimes the breezy tone is less appropriate—memoranda showing how Betty Crocker psychologists exploited women's fears of failure in the kitchen arouse no comment from the author. Assertions that designers provided buyers a sensation of mobility and choice, and that these aren't bad aims, on the other hand, make sense. And Marling's right in noting that critics often missed what was pleasurable—and anti-elitist—about ``populuxe'' fashions of the '50s. Though Marling chooses to remain more chronicler than critic, this archaeology of our recent visual past is as important as any recent political history of the period, and far fresher in approach. (Illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-674-04882-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
An ideal pathfinder on the Beatles' long and winding road from moptops to magi—insightful, informative, contentious, and as ambitious and surprising as its heroes. Popular music criticism is often a thankless task, falling uneasily between mindless hype and lugubrious academicism. MacDonald, former deputy editor of New Musical Express, adroitly bridges that gap, taking the factual chassis—recording session data, itineraries, etc.—laboriously assembled by Beatlemaniacs like Mark Lewisohn and bringing to bear a fan's enthusiasm, a musicologist's trained ear, and a critic's discernment to produce the most rigorous and reliable assessment of the Beatles' artistic achievement to date. Advancing chronologically through the songs, MacDonald provides an encyclopedic wealth of biographical, musical, and historical detail, yet always keeps his eyes on the prize—the uniquely rich elixir the group distilled from these disparate elements. He considers the Beatles on their own musical and cultural terms, taking his cue from contemporary influences (rhythm-and-blues, soul, and the supercharged social crucible of the '60s), rather than straining for highbrow parallels in Schoenberg or Schubert—you'll find no reference to the infamous ``Aeolian cadences'' of ``This Boy'' here. MacDonald makes no bones about his own critical convictions: He prefers the artful structures of pop, its ``energetic topicality'' that ``captures a mood or style in a condensed instant,'' to rock's ``dull grandiosity,'' a shift he attributes to a general retreat since the '60s away from depth and craftsmanship into spectacle and sensation. Accordingly, he champions the pop classicism of the Beatles' early-middle period, culminating in Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, and in his most memorably acerbic passages deplores the rockist leanings of their later work: ``Helter Skelter,'' for instance, is dismissed as ``ridiculous, McCartney shrieking weedily against a backdrop of out-of-tune thrashing.'' The ultimate Beatles Bible? Certainly a labor of love, and all the more valuable for holding the Fabs to the highest critical standards.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-2780-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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