An intelligent, evenhanded look at a changing society and its legal foundations.
A dual biography of the pioneering jurists whose arrival on the Supreme Court both commemorated and invigorated the movement toward gender equality.
Hirshman (Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, 2012, etc.), an attorney who has argued before the Supreme Court, counts herself among the countless beneficiaries of that trend, having in just a few short years gone from an outlier as a woman in the world of law to “a pretty normal player.” It would be hard to find two people less alike than Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the one a conservative who grew up on a New Mexico ranch and entered politics with the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, the other a liberal Democrat from Brooklyn who had been a feminist activist for years before attaining her seat at the bench. Yet both were also accomplished lawyers who broke into the profession “when there was not even a whisper of a women’s legal movement,” setting precedents that encouraged other women to follow. Hirshman notes what might seem to be detriments, from Ginsburg’s occasional brittleness and possible legal missteps, such as suggesting that abortion should have been argued as a matter of women's equality in 1973—the author’s reasoning on that count is subtle but generally convincing—to O’Connor’s loyalty to William Rehnquist, who, after all, was an enemy of precisely the same attainments of civil rights for which O’Connor was in the vanguard. Yet both O’Connor and Ginsburg “recognized that women could use the law to pry open realms of life foreclosed to them by historical practices of exclusion,” and they did just that. Hirshman goes on to examine not just their role in reforming the culture of the Supreme Court and the tenor of some aspects of the law, but also their work on specific issues such as affirmative action and sex discrimination.
An intelligent, evenhanded look at a changing society and its legal foundations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-223846-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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