Perhaps too lofty for the general reader, but for anyone with a wary eye on the battles ahead, Schwartz’s argument is...
This balanced scholarly investigation of the Founding Fathers’ divergent notions of inherent freedoms—in historical and contemporary terms—is sure to confound those who think they learned everything they need to know in 9th-grade civics.
In his most recent work, prolific independent scholar/essayist Schwartz (God’s Phallus, 1995, etc.) examines the seldom-discussed doubts Thomas Jefferson held about the “inalienable rights” he so eloquently enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—that seemingly inexhaustible sound-bite goldmine for Tea Partiers and other underinformed latter-day sloganeers. Unlike James W. Loewen’s corrective Lies My Teacher Told Me, Schwartz’s work doesn’t rewrite history as it has been taught to, and (mis)understood, by generations of Americans—rather, the author examines it contextually and philosophically. In measured, meditative language, he probes the Lockean themes of personal liberty that informed the debate surrounding the drafting of Jefferson’s Declaration. Schwartz also attempts to clarify Jefferson’s ambiguous personal stance and his ultimate acquiescence to the Continental Congress for the greater good of the fledgling democracy they engendered, by proclaiming independence from British rule in 1776. Passionate, literate and argumentative, the Founders were making things up on the fly, but ultimately, the author posits, it matters little who preferred Hume to Lock, or the ratio of deists to theists. The author declares that “the Declaration and the founders’ views are essentially as relevant or irrelevant to the nature of rights in America” as the reader’s or his are now—that is, “they may be illuminating, but they are not prescriptive.” While he shrewdly avoids name-calling and easy solutions, Schwartz’s message is clearly cautionary, warning that those who attempt to promote present-day political agendas based on misperceptions of centuries-old compromises of thought and language do so at their, and our, peril. The author urges that the current debate should shift “from what the founders meant” to “the values that ultimately we want to embrace and protect.”
Perhaps too lofty for the general reader, but for anyone with a wary eye on the battles ahead, Schwartz’s argument is absorbing and profound.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0982832509
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Other Ideas
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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