The landscape of free speech is in constant flux, and Baron provides important context to the current debates.
An expert on language reviews the complex issues around free speech and what they mean for democratic practice.
Free speech is one of the key principles of American democracy, but Baron, an emeritus professor of English and author specializing in this field, describes it as more like “free speech, but.” Despite the First Amendment prohibition on government regulation of speech, there have always been exceptions and rules. It is a vital area for study and debate, but a problem with the book is that Baron, while presenting himself as a dispassionate expert, shows his liberal leanings too often. When he discusses extremists who would limit free speech, he focuses only on conservative activists, ignoring the left-wing variety. Though Donald Trump’s presidency was unquestionably chaotic and most likely corrupt, the author’s tone regarding the former president feels like he’s trying to score points with liberal readers. For example, in the section on the prohibition of threats to the president, he skips over the many threats to assassinate Trump, such as the public statement by Madonna that she wanted to blow up the White House, and instead focuses on Trump’s (admittedly) dubious pronouncements. He also includes a long section on gun ownership and the Second Amendment, although the connection with free speech is not clear. Despite these issues, Baron provides a useful and interesting examination of the court cases related to free speech and includes a discussion on the changing parameters relating to obscenity, sedition, artistic expression, and threats. Passing a law is one thing, and interpreting it for practical application is quite another. “Despite the large body of legal rulings,” writes the author, “the border between protected and unprotected speech is seldom clear or stable, which may leave speakers unsure about what they can say and when. Laws may protect speech, but they always leave some speech unprotected.”
The landscape of free speech is in constant flux, and Baron provides important context to the current debates.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-00-919890-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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