Sehat ably shows how the exploitation of the founders debases political debate and neglects policy evaluation—required...
Sehat (History/Georgia State Univ.; The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 2011) indicts the political ploy of invoking the Constitution to support projects from the sublime to the absurd.
It’s certainly not a new game. Even the Founding Fathers railed against those who “misinterpreted” what they wrote. Thomas Jefferson’s rhetorical posturing is often the preferred reference, particularly regarding states’ rights or first principles. Jefferson and James Madison’s strict constructionism fought Alexander Hamilton’s federalist policies in a struggle that made the period one of the most partisan in American history. The pragmatic Jefferson understood and adjusted his politics in the face of reality, and his compromises eventually produced a neo-federalism that included almost all of Hamilton’s proposals. The Constitution was indeterminate; the founders agreed on the wording but not necessarily on its many possible meanings. The author traces our history through the changing interpretations, including Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise, his “Genuine American System” of cooperative economics and his efforts in the South Carolina nullification crisis of 1842. Up until the Civil War, nearly everyone cited the Constitution, as strict interpretations fought with adaptive, liberal ones. The founders were ignored after the Civil War through the Progressive Era, but the modern fight began in earnest with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the tumultuous 1960s and today’s tea party activism. Current obstructive politics have taken simple-minded rhetoric, paranoid behavior, and baseless propaganda to new and wholly unsubstantiated heights. A quote from Adam Kirsch in the New York Times pinpoints the author’s view: “To believe that American institutions were ever perfect…makes it too easy to believe that they are perfect now. Both assumptions…are sins against the true spirit of the Constitution, which demands that we keep reimagining our way to a more perfect union.”
Sehat ably shows how the exploitation of the founders debases political debate and neglects policy evaluation—required reading for those desperate for sane, intelligent political arguments.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7977-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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