Smith gives us the knowledge that imparts the power to change and, more importantly, the hope that it can succeed.
Smith (Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia, 2002, etc.) uses the fight for “one person, one vote” to explain the workings of the Supreme Court.
The book is invaluable for anyone who wishes to understand the court, especially those who aren’t familiar with legal jargon. The author clearly explains the procedures that led up to and followed each case. It’s not just three hours of presentation, a vote and opinions delivered; the nine justices and their clerks devote countless hours to each and every case. The cases brought to the Warren Court against state legislatures all concern disproportionate representation of place over population, with rural areas exerting more control than highly populated cities. Decennial reapportionment requirements were ignored, and the few controlled the many. The first and most cited decision was Colgrove v. Green (1946), in which the court denied its jurisdiction over state legislatures. It wasn’t until 1959 in Baker v. Carr that the court accepted its role. In case after case, the court faced the decision of whether it could apply the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause or hide behind the 15th’s right to vote despite race and other factors. The author takes us through five important cases of 1963 without legal droning or prolix explanations. Even after the court decision requiring “one person, one vote” for both houses of state legislatures, Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois attempted to pass resolutions against the ruling and even proposed a constitutional convention. Still, malapportionment’s evil twin, gerrymandering, along with the current trend of “one dollar, one vote,” often succeeds in tilting the balance of power.
Smith gives us the knowledge that imparts the power to change and, more importantly, the hope that it can succeed.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8090-7423-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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