by Matthew Crenson & Benjamin Ginsberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2007
A comprehensive, judicious and even alarming view of a constitutional crisis.
The increasing authority of the president and the consequent imbalance of power threaten democracy, say Crenson and Ginsberg (both Political Science/Johns Hopkins Univ.).
Their book, which includes more than 40 pages of endnotes, is addressed to readers concerned with the political health of America and remains generally nonpartisan. The authors view the shift in balance as a crime and frame their argument using terms familiar to watchers of TV cop shows: motive, means, opportunity. An opening chapter provides outlines; the remaining ones examine factors more closely. Crenson and Ginsberg note numerous historical changes in the US method of selecting presidents. The early ones were Revolutionary heroes of several sorts; then powerful political parties emerged, and candidates became party animals; only fairly recently have we seen highly ambitious candidates use the mass media and the primary system to attract the spotlight. The authors describe an ever-expanding executive branch and the weapons at a president’s disposal: vetoes, executive orders, signing statements, regulations. Today’s presidents, they aver, possess “a capacity for unilateral action unforeseen in the Constitution.” Crenson and Ginsberg take a long look at the president’s increasing ability to make war, a power the Constitution specifically assigns to Congress. Near the end, they offer analyses of the decline of congressional power and the recent tendency of federal courts to support the executive branch when it scrapes against the legislative house. One reason they discern is that most federal judges used to have a legislative background; today, fewer than five percent do. As the authors demonstrate, the courts have consistently upheld the initiatives of the executive branch in matters of foreign policy and war and national emergency. They marvel at an apparent paradox: Even as a president’s popularity plummets, his power increases.
A comprehensive, judicious and even alarming view of a constitutional crisis.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06488-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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