A tightly written, tightly reasoned biography aimed at readers who are not legal scholars.
In the latest installment of the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, a legal scholar examines the career of Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), “the most important American critic of what he called ‘the curse of bigness’ in government and business since Thomas Jefferson.”
National Constitution Center president and CEO Rosen (The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America, 2007, etc.) states unambiguously that he is not attempting to offer a comprehensive biography, citing three high-quality, full-life biographies published after Brandeis left the Supreme Court in 1939. Rather, he presents “a condensed study of his thought and character." Throughout the book, Rosen considers Brandeis as a philosopher and prophet; many of his teachings transcended the opinions related to specific cases decided by the Supreme Court. As the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, Brandeis surely based some of his ideas on his religious upbringing. To the extent that the author focuses on Brandeis' Jewishness, the conversation veers toward Zionism, as Brandeis tirelessly advocated for a newly created Jewish homeland in Palestine that might protect followers of the faith from anti-Semitism. More than Jewish influences, though, Rosen considers Brandeis as a student of Thomas Jefferson's writings and speeches, even suggesting Brandeis be remembered as the Jewish Jefferson. The commonalities between Jefferson and Brandeis coalesce around skepticism about the value of economic monopolies and bankers as well as the oft-ignored value of small farmers and other entrepreneurs. Like Jefferson, Brandeis vigorously supported the system of a federal government, each of the states sharing authority wisely, with each state as an autonomous laboratory of democracy. Within each of those states, Brandeis, like Jefferson, hoped optimistically that every citizen would become well-informed through lifelong self-education. In an epilogue titled "What Would Brandeis Do?" Rosen traces the justice's influence today, specifically on three contemporary Supreme Court justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer.
A tightly written, tightly reasoned biography aimed at readers who are not legal scholars.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-15867-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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