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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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