An incisive consideration of the Supremes, offering erudite yet accessible clues to legal thinking on the most important...
Considering past as prologue, Tushnet (Constitutional Law/Georgetown) pursues individual Supreme Court members to analyze their thinking in some significant cases.
The Court’s announced positions do not represent neat divisions between such comparative liberals as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and archconservatives like Antonin Scalia, the author finds. Rather, the most important split is between hard-line conservative Republicans—Scalia and Clarence Thomas, for example—and the more traditional Republicans, including Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter. No wonder the judicial branch has nudged the nation to the right, though perhaps not as far as the Chief Justice might have wished. Tushnet (Making Civil Rights Law, 1994) provides astute reviews of landmark cases dealing with such public concerns as the religious right, gay rights, abortion, affirmative action, free speech, and crime. Judging many of the justices in light of the cases upon which they opined, the author sees Clarence Thomas as unwilling to countenance any change in the 1789 Constitution, Kennedy as pompous, Breyer as a bit weird, Ginsburg as family-minded, and Souter as a modern man of the 19th century. Tushnet reserves most of the dissing for Scalia, described as “splenetic” and not “as smart as he thinks he is.” Legal stratagems are explained, the arcana of the law are rendered lucid throughout, and the author’s fly-on-the-wall coverage of the courthouse is quite credible. For the future, Tushnet concludes, we can look forward to more “borking”: that is, to the Senate vetting and ultimately rejecting candidates for places on the bench because of their on-record political convictions. We can also look forward to more politics: decisions based less on settled law, more on the political agenda of the executive branch, as well as on the agenda of the justices themselves. About the only thing left unexplained: those strange gold stripes on the sleeves of the Chief’s robes.
An incisive consideration of the Supremes, offering erudite yet accessible clues to legal thinking on the most important level.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05868-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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