A treat for obsessive court watchers that’s accessible to general readers.
A distinguished constitutional law scholar examines the complex, occasionally surprising interplay of law and politics that explains decisions from our closely divided, highest court.
Constitutional jurisprudence involves reasoning from rules and precedent, the sort of legal analysis any lawyer or judge well understands, but it’s also shaded by a uniquely political dimension. By “politics,” Harvard Law School professor Tushnet (Why the Constitution Matters, 2011, etc.) means nothing so bald as the latest partisan dispatch from Democratic or Republican headquarters, but rather the “political structures and political visions” that produce nominees for the court, account for the principles and philosophies of the justices, shape arguments brought to the Supreme Court for adjudication, and frequently tip the balance in decisions. If the intellectual leadership of the Roberts Court passes from the chief justice to, say, Justice Elena Kagan—as it may if Obama is afforded future nominations—the shift will be attributable to this operation of politics on the court’s judgments. Tushnet teases out his argument with chapters devoted to the Roberts Court’s decisions on Obamacare, especially, and on other major cases dealing with affirmative action, gun rights, business interests, campaign finance and the First Amendment. The author is particularly good on the vetting process for justices, explaining how each party and president (with fingers crossed) approachs the selection of nominees. But the court, as Tushnet points out, plays a long game, and the mere passage of time can upset today’s careful political calculation. Things change, including the composition of political parties, the makeup of the court and the relations among the justices. Moreover, when politics and law mingle, as a number of the First Amendment decisions demonstrate, the “conservative versus liberal” narrative is not always so straightforward. Tushnet is an informed, experienced observer—he clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall and owes his Harvard appointment to then-dean Kagan—and he proves a sure-footed guide in difficult terrain.
A treat for obsessive court watchers that’s accessible to general readers.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-07344-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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