Proponents of an activist central government will find intellectual comfort in these pages—but they will give...
A novel consideration of American history offers a fresh view of a foundational document.
Fletcher (Law/Columbia Univ.) argues that the Constitution cleaves into two ill-fitting parts, rather like the Old and New Testaments. The dividing point between them is the Civil War, which called forth a new constitutional order that was devoted less to “voluntary association, individual freedom, and republican elitism” (as the Constitution of 1787 was) than to “organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy.” If the source of authority of the first Constitution was “We the people,” then the source for the second was “the nation as defined by history.” This so-called Secret Constitution, whose preamble is the Gettysburg Address, ushered in the program of reconstruction and federation-building that would yield the modern US; in doing so, it inaugurated the era of Big Government, an entity that actively worked to assure equality under the law and in actual practice. This recasting of the government’s role was never made explicit, the author suggests, largely because many state and even federal courts actively opposed the transformation. But even with that opposition, the old order of sovereignty gave way to a new one, in which the states were “enmeshed in the [federal] law and subordinate to it.” This tension between state and federal claims of supremacy endures, Fletcher notes, and nowhere more plainly than in what he considers to be the outmoded and antidemocratic institution of the Electoral College—which he savages in a brilliant closing chapter devoted to the 2000 presidential election.
Proponents of an activist central government will find intellectual comfort in these pages—but they will give anti-federalists fits.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514142-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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