An affectionate and engaging biography of the ``rumpled bear of a man'' who served as the liberal conscience of the Supreme Court, and as its first African-American justice, from 1967 until his retirement last year. While today many know Marshall from his Supreme Court years, his signal contributions to civil rights came as an NAACP lawyer. Clark, a former Time magazine writer, and Davis, a professional journalist (The Atlanta Constitution, etc.), describe how Marshall's career, like those of many great lawyers, was shaped by an influential law professor—in Marshall's case, Howard University's Charles Hamilton Houston, who conceived of civil litigation as a method of social engineering. In 1935, after graduating from Howard, Marshall assisted Houston in a suit that compelled the University of Maryland to admit African-American applicants. Marshall went on to investigate lynchings in his home state of Maryland, to win salary equalization for Baltimore's teachers, and to assist in organizing boycotts—but it was his stirring appellate advocacy before the Supreme Court that won him lasting fame. Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued, including Smith v. Allwright, which won voting rights for disenfranchised African-Americans; Shelly v. Kraemer, which struck down racially restrictive covenants; and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down legal segregation in education. After his appointment to the liberal Court of Earl Warren, Marshall formed part of the majority; as the Court became more conservative, he found himself increasingly in dissent. The authors supply much anecdotal detail about Marshall's colorful personality and robust humor (when President Nixon inquired about Marshall's health when the justice was hospitalized, Marshall responded, ``not yet''). Above all, Davis and Clark show that, though Marshall ended in isolation on the Court, his life and career resulted in lasting achievements in civil rights. A warm and fitting tribute that provides an excellent examination of the development of Marshall's jurisprudence. (Twenty-four pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-133-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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