An openly liberal polemic, but nevertheless a brilliant summary of the important legal trends of the last 20 years.
Prominent New York lawyer and television commentator Garbus (Tough Talk, 1998, etc.) lucidly examines the threat he sees developing from an increasingly conservative judicial system.
Since 1980, Republicans have controlled the legal system more and more, the author contends. Reagan's Supreme Court appointments and the ascendancy of the Federalist Society, founded in 1982 and now the country's most powerful legal organization, have succeeded in reversing the liberal Warren Court’s decisions. Although Miranda v. Arizona (1966) guaranteed constitutional protections to criminal suspects, 60 related cases have subsequently been decided with only two rulings benefiting the defendant. In Atwater v. City of Lago Vista (2001), Gail Atwater, driving with two infants in her car, was arrested, handcuffed, and jailed for a seatbelt violation. Bringing her suit to the high court, she lost on grounds that policemen cannot immediately tell whether a suspect is jailable. Chief Justice Rehnquist openly opposes the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which granted women a legal right to an abortion, and in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert P. Casey (1992), he came only one vote short of denying women that right. Any nominee of George W. Bush will probably reverse the 5-4 decision. For 30 years, asserts Garbus, the religious right has successfully pressed to blur the separation of church and state. In Mitchell v. Holmes, argued in 1999, the Court voted 6-3 to uphold a Louisiana law that permitted the state to loan computers and books to parochial schools. Dissenters Souter, Stevens, and Ginsburg saw the implicit danger that religious schools could benefit from taxpayer money. Garbus reviews cases covering environmental issues, employee rights, affirmative action, and federal versus state sovereignty. His portraits of the nine justices are most scathing in the cases of hardhearted Rehnquist and incompetent Thomas. He concludes by urging his allies to fight the present prevailing powers.
An openly liberal polemic, but nevertheless a brilliant summary of the important legal trends of the last 20 years.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6918-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Murray has left as his final gift a lovely book of song. (8 pp. b&w photo insert)
A season in the lives of young singers struggling get noticed in the demanding world of opera, alluringly told by prolific writer and tenor Murray (City of the Soul, 2003, etc.).
The author, who died in March 2005, spent 24 weeks during the 2003–04 season with 12 artists in the Lyric Opera of Chicago training program, a launching pad for many great international careers. What makes the training program so special is not only the quality of its singers, but the talented coaches who guide the artists through their exercises and roles, instructing them in dramatic interpretation, language meaning and pronunciation and movement. Murray shines in chronicling the development of the singers’ technique; his prose is gratifying, his dry humor a pleasure. He is wonderfully adept at evoking the particular musical personalities of the singers, and he stands in awe of their courage and professionalism. Murray understatedly brings his own history as an opera singer into the picture when it helps shed light on the challenges faced by his subjects. (Of that career, he says: “[I]t never amounted to much, but it had deeply enriched my life.”) He is sensitive to the aspects of opera that help create “sacred monsters,” singers of such ego and celebrity they are like forces of nature. Aspiring artists are judged day after day, he writes, and rarely given more than a nod of acknowledgement. So if perchance one becomes a great star, he or she may well feel it’s another’s turn to play the supplicant.
Murray has left as his final gift a lovely book of song. (8 pp. b&w photo insert)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5360-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
A bold attempt to understand a tormented genius, to examine a grisly crime and to explain the latter’s effects both on...
An informative, swift-moving account of how Edgar Allan Poe transformed a sensational 1841 New York City murder into “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (published in three installments in the winter of 1842–3).
Stashower knows murder, and he knows the craft of biography. He has written mystery novels (Elephants in the Distance, 1989) and an Edgar-winning life of Arthur Conan Doyle (Teller of Tales, 1999) and brings to this current, complex task both considerable intelligence and wide-ranging research (he scoured Poe scholarship, 19th-century newspapers and Poe’s letters and fiction). For a while, chapters alternate between the murder investigation and the life of Poe. But eventually, the two converge. Mary Rogers, by universal assent, was a beautiful young woman who worked in a cigar shop. Men—not all of them smokers—flocked to the store. But Mary’s life was not untroubled. In 1838, she wrote a suicide note, disappeared, then returned to work. She had at least two serious suitors (both would soon be murder suspects). On a summer Sunday, she left home, supposedly to visit her aunt and attend church. A few days later, her body was found floating in the surf. The initial examination revealed signs of rape and strangulation. Local newspapers—both Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett were involved—fanned the flames of the investigation, printing ever more lurid speculations. Some men were arrested, but all were eventually released. And the case gradually fell from the front pages. Enter struggling writer E.A. Poe, who had already written his first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and believed his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, could solve the Rogers case. Poe had published two installments of “Roget” when alarming new evidence suggested that Mary had died during an abortion. Poe had to modify his final installment.
A bold attempt to understand a tormented genius, to examine a grisly crime and to explain the latter’s effects both on Gotham’s system of law enforcement and on abortion legislation.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-525-94981-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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