A fascinating look at the life and thought of the great jurist and scholar that vividly connects his sometimes dry legal pedantry and his remarkable life and personality. White (Law and History/University of Virginia; Earl Warren, 1982, etc.—not reviewed) presents a more rounded portrait than Livia Baker's The Justice from Beacon Hill (1991), which emphasized Holmes's life and character. Instead, White underscores the evolution of the jurist's unique career and jurisprudence from the unusual circumstances of his life. White represents Holmes's commitment to ``professionalism'' as a reaction against the dilettantish literary culture of his father: The jurist, he tells us, gave up his early love of letters and philosophy in order to devote himself totally to legal scholarship (he became editor of the prestigious American Law Review while still a practicing attorney). White also doesn't neglect the effect of Holmes's Civil War career on his philosophy: Holmes spent most of the war recovering from wounds incurred at Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville, and White speculates that the experience led to an early emphasis on ``duties'' rather than rights in Holmes's legal thought. The author points out, however, that this emphasis faded after Holmes became a judge, first on Massachusetts's Supreme Court, then on the US Supreme Court; he evolved, in fact, into one of the early champions of First Amendment rights. White devotes a chapter to Holmes's classic The Common Law (1881), which he shows as reflecting the pragmatic and empirical cast of Holmes's thought, and he also discusses at length the quirks of Holmes's personal life—his childless marriage, his many flirtations, and his emotionally significant romance with Clare Castletown—making the jurist come alive despite the many contradictions of his personality. Here, Holmes is depicted not as the civil libertarian of legal myth but as a judge and scholar whose jurisprudence reflected his life and the intellectual milieu in which he lived. A fine, balanced portrait. (Fourteen halftones)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-508182-X
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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