A well-written, salutary illustration of the principle that honorable men can disagree about the pace and the means of...
Two midcentury giants clash behind the scenes over civil liberties.
How much can a political leader do to advance necessary social change in the face of entrenched resistance without provoking a challenge to the legitimacy of governmental institutions? Disagreement on this point soured the relations between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Earl Warren, both hugely popular public figures. In September 1953, Eisenhower appointed Warren, a three-term governor of California with no judicial experience, as chief justice of the United States. Warren went on to forge a surprisingly liberal legacy, to Eisenhower's chagrin. While the Warren-led court broke new constitutional ground in many areas, former New York Law School dean Simon (FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle Over the New Deal, 2012, etc.) focuses primarily on judicial responses to the nascent civil rights movement and to the political hysteria of McCarthyism. Warren coaxed a unanimous opinion from a conservative court in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional. The ruling brought him into conflict with Eisenhower, who never endorsed it, in part because he entertained serious practical concerns about the enforceability of court orders desegregating schools in rabidly hostile parts of the South. On national security grounds, Eisenhower, along with much of the public, also privately rejected court decisions defeating government efforts to punish suspected communists. While respecting Eisenhower's viewpoint, the author generally sides with Warren in faulting the president's failure to provide clearer moral leadership in the civil rights struggle or to stand up to the bullying McCarthy. Simon frames these conflicts within a robust, detailed narrative, clearly presenting the political and cultural milieu within which these two principled pragmatists worked. The author’s presentation of discussions among the court justices about the legal issues at stake is particularly illuminating.
A well-written, salutary illustration of the principle that honorable men can disagree about the pace and the means of effecting social change.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87140-755-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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