A compelling case that any just assessment of free speech means thinking outside the frame of the First Amendment.
An indictment of the First Amendment for protecting toxic speech while stifling speech that “challenges hierarchies of gender, race, religion, and class.”
A law professor at George Washington University and the author of The Cult of the Constitution, Franks claims that the First Amendment contributes to injustice by enabling powerful and privileged individuals and organizations to use speech to harm the most vulnerable. Cushioned by the law, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in 2017, and Twitter (now X) hosts and circulates bigoted and threatening posts. Such reckless speech strengthens racism and misogyny, she argues, while discussions of diversity, equality, inclusion, race, and gender are restricted in many public schools. Worsening matters is the false portrayal of the private, commodified world of social media as the new public sphere. Franks dreams of a world in which fearless speech that speaks truth to power is encouraged and defended. She thus shifts the debate from free versus censored speech to reckless versus fearless speech. Her heroes are people like Sophie Scholl, an outspoken student activist executed by the Nazis, and Christine Blasey Ford, who, at Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court nomination hearings, testified about his alleged teenage sexual assault on her. Although Franks discusses legal issues, she is more concerned that speech be evaluated in the context of “objective, historical, material conditions of subordination.” The issue is whether speech enhances or degrades justice and democracy, and her argument leads away from judicial reform to broad educational initiatives. Franks’ zealous tone and uncompromising approach, which may put off some readers, are nonetheless appropriate, given her view that the First Amendment has long been used to validate speech that causes harm and glorifies violence beyond what a just and decent society should tolerate. Franks leaves it for others to make the counterargument.
A compelling case that any just assessment of free speech means thinking outside the frame of the First Amendment.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781645030539
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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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