The Rehnquist legacy harshly gaveled down.
A much-awarded legal journalist serves up an investigative biography of the controversial, late chief justice.
Famously distrustful of the press, William Rehnquist (1924–2005) divulged little about himself during his three decades on the nation’s highest court. CQ Press president and publisher Jenkins (Ladies’ Man: The Life and Trials of Marvin Mitchelson, 1992, etc.) uncovers some nuggets about the private man, some amusing—he loved making small wagers on almost any proposition; he drafted a novel repeatedly rejected by publishers—some startling—during the early 1980s “he was desperately, abusively addicted to prescription pain killers.” The author credits Rehnquist with high intelligence and good humor and persuasively argues that his temperament most closely resembled his ideological counterpart, the iconoclastic William O. Douglas. He uncovers the origins of Rehnquist’s conservatism and explores his law school career, his clerkship under Robert Jackson, his rise in the Goldwater and his tenure in the Mitchell Justice Department under Nixon. But when he turns to Rehnquist’s jurisprudence, Jenkins unrelentingly scorns the man he blames for the court’s current politicization. He flays Rehnquist as an unprincipled conservative who looked first to the desired result and only then to the reasoning, who valued efficiency over justice, who ignored precedent, who favored broad governmental power over civil rights, who lacked any “consistent constitutional theory” save for his own consistently “reactionary ideology.” Many of our laws later conformed to the famously lone dissents of Rehnquist’s early career, but Jenkins attributes this not to the chief’s leadership, but rather to the court’s changing composition. As with many court commentators, Jenkins equates “maturation” or “growth” with change, almost always a change from right to left. That Rehnquist “could not evolve,” the author takes as a huge black mark against the man who “made it respectable to be an expedient conservative on the Court.”
The Rehnquist legacy harshly gaveled down.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1586488871
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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