A thorough and thoroughly smart rendering of a dramatic Constitutional showdown.
The ideological battle between the New Deal president and the Supreme Court’s Nine Old Men.
Working secretly with Attorney General Homer Cummings, in 1937 Franklin Roosevelt drafted a bill to enlarge the Court, allowing the president to make immediate appointments of more ideologically congenial justices. The plan resulted in a humiliating defeat, the biggest blunder of Roosevelt’s presidency. How and why did the most talented politician of the 20th century miscalculate so horribly? While not entirely rejecting the consensus that attributes FDR’s court-packing fiasco to sheer hubris, former Clinton speechwriter Shesol (Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade, 1997, etc.) offers a more nuanced take, making clear FDR’s move against the court involved more than momentary presidential pique or landslide giddiness. Rather, the president’s scheme emerged after two years’ worth of careful consultation about various proposals to “fix” the Court, including amending the Constitution. Moreover, there was genuine, widespread disgust with the Court’s refusal to sanction modern solutions to an unprecedented economic crisis. FDR might well have prevailed, but for a concatenation of events: his own penchant for mystery and surprise that shut off debate among advisors at the critical point when the measure was finalized; his absurd masking of a straightforward fight against outcome-oriented judges as an attempt to help aging jurists with their workload; and his abandonment by progressives threatened by his power and party regulars too long taken for granted. In addition, the untimely death of Majority Leader Joe Robinson, the surprise retirement of conservative Justice Willis Van Devanter and the Court’s subsequent string of decisions upholding important New Deal laws—the famous “switch in time [that] saved nine”—blunted enthusiasm for radical judicial reform. With insight and more than occasional humor, Shesol covers all aspects of the controversy, deftly explaining the issues at stake in a variety of legal opinions and shrewdly analyzing the intra-Court dynamics.
A thorough and thoroughly smart rendering of a dramatic Constitutional showdown.Pub Date: March 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06474-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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