Mayer’s industry, his obvious good will and humor persuade even those opposed to his politics or leery of his proposed...
A brief history, a current assessment and, finally, a plea for reform of America’s courts.
Alexander Hamilton was, perhaps, never more wrong than when he characterized the court system as “the least dangerous branch” of the proposed new American government. Over the past 200 years, the courts have emerged to an astonishing extent as the final arbiters of the rights and duties attendant to our democracy. With this authority comes an enormous capacity for mischief. Who are these people who wield such great power, these judges, some 30,000 of them, who handle 92-million cases a year? Mayer (The Fed, 2001, etc.) answers this question and much more, though he has little patience for high flown talk about the rule of law, the role of law or the glories of the adversary system. Instead, he insists on examining the federal, state and county court system as it is: overburdened, understaffed, out-moded and thoroughly unprepared to address the problems of the 21st century. Intended for the general reader, his well-reported, informal narrative identifies our blind adherence to lofty myth and hopeless politicization of the courts as the chief obstacles to reform. Interpolated throughout are chapters devoted to specialty courts that appear to work well—the federal tax court, the so-called “therapy” drug court in Brooklyn, the Colorado water courts—and these vignettes prepare the reader for Mayer’s proposed remedy. No honest observer of our courts at work can wholly approve of them. We are, he argues, long past the time when our disputes ought be handed over to those who owe their robes to political activity. Writing from a frankly disclosed center-left perspective, he insists that we do more to protect the independence of the judiciary, increase efforts to educate and train judges to judge—quite a different thing from training lawyers to advocate—and move increasingly in the direction of problem-solving, specialty courts, familiar with the discourse of other learned professions.
Mayer’s industry, his obvious good will and humor persuade even those opposed to his politics or leery of his proposed solutions that he just might be right.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-28975-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Truman Talley/St. Martin’s
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
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