A groundbreaking work: intellectually rigorous but always accessible; timely yet (given the current abundance of bad news...
A comprehensive and encouraging study of the way the rule of law has evolved in eastern and southern Africa, as exemplified in the intellectual evolution of Francis L. Nyalali, Chief Justice of Tanzania from 1976 through 1991.
Nyalali, a devout Christian and admirer of John Marshall, brought about positive changes in the administration of justice even at a time when Tanzania was a one-party state. By using his judicial career as a case study, Widner (Law and Development/Univ. of Michigan) issues a cogently argued reminder of the law’s power to do good. She first examines the status of law and justice in the newly independent African nations of the 1960s. Fledgling judiciaries found themselves undermanned and often overwhelmed by the task of blending customary tribal law with common law, of finding suitable venues, and of making the courts accessible to everyone. The 1970s, she notes next, were a low point in many countries: one-party, often dictatorial rule prevailed; many lawyers and radical intellectuals began calling for the end of an independent judiciary. By the 1980s, matters began to improve, accelerating further in the 1990s as the law came to be seen as the guarantor of democracy, a free economy, and human rights, particularly the rights of women and those accused of crimes. Widner notes the important role judges like Nyalali played as they spearheaded these changes, seeking counsel and help from the US and other countries, embracing programs like “street law,” and working to create a written record of proceedings that would help future judges.
A groundbreaking work: intellectually rigorous but always accessible; timely yet (given the current abundance of bad news from Africa) refreshingly optimistic.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05037-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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