An authoritative, impressive assessment of a man whose legal reasoning continues to influence our republic.
A comprehensive biography of an American legal giant.
A lawyer, reformer, Zionist and judge who demonstrated a unique blend of idealism and pragmatism, Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) was an unusual specimen whose career at the bar was every bit as distinguished as his tenure on the bench. From the outset of this detailed study, likely to become the standard biography, Urofsky (Law & Public Policy/Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; Money and Free Speech: Campaign Finance Reform and the Courts, 2005, etc.) confesses the difficulty of getting at the inner life of a man little given to introspection. As a Boston practitioner for nearly 40 years, Brandeis doggedly pursued “all the facts that surround” a case, and his penchant for incorporating sociological and economic materials in his legal arguments created a model later known as a “Brandeis brief.” He pioneered the modern law-office practice, and his pro bono work on behalf of a variety of progressive reforms covering insurance, transportation and utilities earned him the title of the “People’s Attorney.” In 1916, as the first Jew ever nominated to the Supreme Court, Brandeis withstood fierce opposition from conservatives opposed to his liberal views. For the next 23 years he continued to entertain arguments and author opinions attacking the then-prevailing legal classicism that obstructed innovation. Often with his colleague and friend, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brandeis famously dissented in a number of civil-liberties cases, most notably insisting on the right of all Americans “to be let alone.” Urofksy assembles every fact pertinent to Brandeis’s personal and professional life—with a few needlessly repeated—and he’s especially good at placing the Justice in a proper historical and legal context, at explaining Brandeis’s passionate attachment to the Zionist cause and at making complex legal issues comprehensible for the general reader.
An authoritative, impressive assessment of a man whose legal reasoning continues to influence our republic.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42366-6
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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