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 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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