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RIGHT WING JUSTICE

THE CONSERVATIVE CAMPAIGN TO TAKE OVER THE COURTS

Read and weep—especially because there are few vacancies for a moderate administration to fill, so that for the foreseeable...

A measured denunciation of what the author deems an ongoing conservative effort to pack the American judiciary with hard-right judges.

Schwartz (Law/American Univ.; ed., The Rehnquist Court, 2002) is plainly displeased by a system that makes William Rehnquist appear to be a judicial moderate, but he is seldom moved to outrage. Instead, he patiently constructs historical and judicial trends, showing that the advances in progressive legislation and interpretation thereof in the New Deal era have been steadily turned back in subsequent years. Schwartz outlines three great transformations in American society in the 20th century, the first two of which came from the New Deal and its liberal successors to institute “a change in the relationship between the federal government and the American people, which established a major role for the government in American economic life.” Much of the conservative backlash has been posed in economic terms: Why, Rehnquist himself once asked, should the government have any right to dictate to whom a business owner can serve a meal? (“It is about time the Court faced the fact,” a young Rehnquist would write, “that the white people in the South don’t like the colored people.”) Whereas Rehnquist often sat alone in upholding, say, school segregation and the rights of employers over employees, he has been joined by countless like-minded peers, thanks to the efforts of Bush administrations I and II to pack the courts: by the time he left office in 1992, Bush I had seen to it that “Republican judges comprised 80 percent of all federal judges and 75 percent of the appellate bench,” leaving little for Bush II to do save to plumb the depths of reaction by nominating to the federal circuit one judge whose consistency in voting to the right surprised even Sen. Orrin Hatch, and another who told Congress that clean air and water regulations were unconstitutional.

Read and weep—especially because there are few vacancies for a moderate administration to fill, so that for the foreseeable future, “the judiciary will be permanently titled toward the extreme right.”

Pub Date: June 1, 2004

ISBN: 1-56025-566-8

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Nation Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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