Next book

COURTING JUSTICE

GAY MEN AND LESBIANS V. THE SUPREME COURT

A telling story of justice’s grinding wheels, and a crackerjack resource volume on gay legal history. (8 pp. photos, not...

The unsettled legalities of gay rights—seen through the lens of Supreme Court decisions—are fully and fascinatingly explored by Detroit News journalists Murdoch and Price (And Say Hi to Joyce, 1995).

As Murdoch and Price make amply clear, the Supreme Court has “determined not to be an engine driving social change in the area of gay rights.” While the authors appreciate that the judiciary is a deliberative (rather than executive) body, they fault it nevertheless for having “been a drag on the nation, holding back the pace of progress toward the full acceptance of gay people.” The court is notoriously secretive, so Murdoch and Price pulled together their materials from the National Archives, newspapers, justices’ papers, and (perhaps most significantly) interviews with the principals and the justices’ clerks. Starting with the court’s decision in favor of One, The Homosexual Magazine in 1958, and continuing through the ruling that upheld the dismissal of a gay scoutmaster in 2000, Murdoch and Price explain the constitutional issues involved—from freedom and fairness to privacy and free speech and due process. In the process they provide a primer on the ways of the Supreme Court—its curious isolation from the involved parties and each justice’s isolation from all the others—and sketch the personalities of William O. Douglas, John Paul Stevens, William J. Brennan, and many others. They include Brennan’s dissenting opinion in a case involving the dismissal of a bisexual schoolteacher, Kameny’s 1960 formulation of “an equal-rights position that would provide much of the intellectual underpinnings for what would be known as the gay-rights movement,” and an examination of sodomy law and its infringement “on the right of privacy and free association.” Among the historical tidbits included is a 1950s New York Times headline: “Perverts Called Government Peril.”

A telling story of justice’s grinding wheels, and a crackerjack resource volume on gay legal history. (8 pp. photos, not seen)

Pub Date: June 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-465-01513-1

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Next book

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

Close Quickview