Rosen ably navigates these murky waters where sexual-harassment, libel, and invasion of privacy jurisprudence intersect with...
A comprehensive and disturbing assessment of the often well-intentioned legal efforts that have culminated in a multi-pronged assault on civic notions of privacy and discretion—usefully epitomized by the Lewinsky affair.
Rosen (George Washington Univ. Law School/New Republic) deftly examines the daunting web of our wired, voyeuristic culture in developing a well-modulated argument for individual privacy in the public sphere. Much of Rosen’s thesis revolves around such diverse phenomena as sexual-harassment law and the increasingly commonplace workplace monitoring of e-communication. Yet Rosen is also concerned with what he persuasively views as a generalized whittling-down of the sanctity of the citizen’s space and “papers,” noting that protections guaranteed in landmark 18th- and 19th-century decisions have been tarnished by recent, infamous proceedings like the Bob Packwood affair (alongside less notorious but interesting cases). Still, Rosen is not tremendously polemical: his arguments are subtly modulated, combining sophisticated legal discussion with a keen sense of our contemporary scene’s foibles, funny and otherwise (as in Bill Clinton’s ironic support for Susan Molinari’s amendments regarding evidence admission to his 1994 crime bill, which later facilitated the Paula Jones lawsuit). Structurally, Rosen follows a sleek line, with simply titled chapters like “Privacy at Home” and “Privacy at Work” that allows his study to function both as an over-arching narrative of this grandiose erosion of the private society and as a handbook for those concerned enough to contemplate resistance, at least on the personal or community level. Such individuals may be most alarmed by the chapter “Privacy in Cyberspace,” which presents recent controversial cases—such as that of a Harvard Divinity School dean ousted for downloading pornography—and describes how every e-mail is centrally preserved and every online move tracked.
Rosen ably navigates these murky waters where sexual-harassment, libel, and invasion of privacy jurisprudence intersect with the mutated informational boundaries of cyberspace; his debut is a cohesive, attractive, and informative take on a truly unsettling, even grotesque face of contemporary life.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44546-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
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