An enlightening and field-defining history about the right to speak and the social consequences of its exercise.
Speaking our minds—sometimes at a price.
“The essential purpose of free speech, declared Cato, was to prevent tyranny and bondage.” Dabhoiwala, a Princeton historian, references the Roman philosopher’s assertion as part of a brilliantly incisive argument about the ways in which free speech has been used—not just to liberate but also to put in bondage. Freedom went hand in hand with slavery for centuries, and this book traces the history of an ideal together with its contradictions. It begins with Greek and Roman antiquity, moves through the middle ages, and arrives in the 20th century to offer a powerful rewriting of the place of words and wills in the exercise of power. Toleration fought against censorship. Secularism contested with religion. Voices of color strained against the crack of white whips. Whether in the time of 18th-century merchants, 19th-century reformers, 20th-century revolutionaries, or 21st-century democracies, free speech remains about “the principled attempt to address the central problems of media ownership, profit and the public good.” We need, the author argues, a social understanding of expression: “Current western theories of free speech, with their focus on individual rights, and their relative neglect of the public good and the realities of the media landscape, are poorly equipped to address the problem” of advancing truth in public discourse. Are there “collective rights?” Should media be unchecked? Does one defame another with thoughtless words? We need to balance “the rights and profits of speakers, publishers and corporations against their responsibilities—towards their users, audiences and the public as a whole,” writes Dabhoiwala. “The history of free speech matters” as we try to balance public with private interests and individual expression with audience response in an increasingly virulent digital world in which anything goes.
An enlightening and field-defining history about the right to speak and the social consequences of its exercise.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9780674987319
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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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