Depressing yet important insights on the state of the union.
A legal scholar presents his solution to today’s crippling political polarization.
Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and author of Worse Than Nothing and We the People, points out that the word democracy never appears in the Constitution, and only one of the four institutions, the House of Representatives, “was elected by the people.” Like many other observers, the author considers the Electoral College its most egregious flaw. Because smaller states opposed popular election of the president, the members of the Constitutional Convention compromised by giving each state a number of “electors” equal to its senators and representatives. Since every state has two senators, this gives small states an advantage because presidents are elected by a majority of electors, rather than votes. Twice this century, the candidate who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College, and this will happen more often as demographic changes continue to concentrate Democratic voters in populous Northern states while Republicans dominate more numerous rural Southern and Midwestern states. Three quarters of the states must approve an amendment to choose a president by popular vote; this is unlikely. Everyone agrees that gerrymandering—drawing electoral boundaries that concentrate the opposing party in the fewest districts—is cheating, but it’s irresistible to the governing party. Some of the author’s suggested reforms, such as eliminating the filibuster or establishing term limits for Supreme Court justices, have modest popular support. Other topics—e.g., the malignant influence of social media or racial justice—are not strictly constitutional issues, but Chemerinsky addresses them nonetheless. His outstanding analysis, however, is not matched by his remedies. He admits that little support exists for replacing the Constitution, and if the political climate continues to degrade, he suggests that secession—hopefully peaceful—between red and blue states is more likely.
Depressing yet important insights on the state of the union.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781324091585
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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