An eloquent and persuasive study of how the American jury system has degenerated since colonial times and what can be done to restore it. ``Jurors are forever smarter than assumed by lawyers working from manuals,'' writes Abramson (Politics/Brandeis; The Electronic Commonwealth, 1988), and he should know; he was a prosecutor in a DA's office. When he argues, for example, that juries should be empowered to vote their consciences even if that means nullifying the law as the judge explains it to them, he is writing both as a scholar well versed in jury practice at the time of the Founding Fathers and as someone with firsthand exposure to modern juries—a rare combination in a legal historian. Abramson probes the historic debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over whether juries should be predominantly ``local'' (neighbors who know local customs but are not impartial with respect to the defendant) or predominantly ``impartial.'' Over time the impartial jury won out, but he argues that the notion of impartiality has come to mean both ``empty-minded'' (witness, he says, the selection of jurors in the trials of Oliver North and the Menendez brothers) and ``representational,'' a convocation of society's various subgroups voting according to their inevitable biases. Abramson has nothing against impanelling women or ethnic minorities on juries; on the contrary, he favors the inclusion of subgroups to insure ``enriched deliberations across group lines.'' His distaste for ``mere proportional representation for group differences'' may strike the reader as a philosophical quibble, but he suggests concrete ways to restore the jury to the 18th-century ideal: impanel well-informed citizens; instruct the jury that they may nullify unjust laws; end all peremptory challenges of jurors based on minority status; insist on unanimous verdicts (which state verdicts do not currently need to be). However, Abramson is also realistic: He knows that juries are incapable of handing down color-blind death sentences and finds that ``intolerable.'' Brilliant, accessible scholarship that perfectly complements Stephen J. Adler's recent, anecdotal The Jury (p. 893).
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-03698-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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