Fitting farewell to an influential jurist who may soon be very much missed.
“She was not raised to sit still,” remarked a weary clerk of Sandra Day O’Connor. Indeed not, as this lively life of the just-retired Associate Justice relates.
Supreme Court chronicler Biskupic writes, mostly admiringly but not unreservedly, of O’Connor, a tough but polite woman who grew up on an Arizona ranch headed by a never-pleased patriarch who, by most accounts, put the fear into everyone he met. Sandy Day was brilliant, a surprise to her classmates at Stanford Law School (including William Rehnquist, whom she briefly dated) and to hapless chauvinists in the Phoenix suburbs, to which she and her husband repaired in 1957. O’Connor served as a state legislator—a fellow senator, meaning to be complimentary, said of her, “this pretty little thing carries a disconcerting load of expertise”—and appeals-court judge before being shortlisted by Attorney General William French Smith to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1981. Though President Reagan had pledged to name a woman to the court, Biskupic writes, “O’Connor’s credentials did not make her an obvious candidate.” On closer examination, administration vetters found that she was politically well-connected and suitably conservative, though big-C rightists had fits when they discovered that O’Connor was generally pro-choice. No matter: she easily passed the audition, only to take a mostly independent course on the bench that put her at odds with doctrinaire types on the left and right alike. Biskupic does a solid job of charting O’Connor’s evolution as a judge who, given her druthers, preferred to seek consensus and split the difference in a given dispute over the slash-and-burn approach of certain other jurists, notably bête noire Antonin Scalia. O’Connor shaped the law, Biskupic concludes, “with her Western pragmatism, her feel for the American center—and a shrewd but quiet negotiating skill.”
Fitting farewell to an influential jurist who may soon be very much missed.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059018-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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
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
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