A well-conceived, well-executed primer, ideal for a bright high schooler, a college student, or even the odd professor who...
A sharp, efficient guide to the creation, content, and construction of the supreme law of the land.
Michael Stokes Paulsen (Law/Univ. of St. Thomas), author of casebooks and numerous articles, brings the legal chops, and son Luke, a Princeton graduate, contributes the sidebars. These thumbnail sketches of important constitutional players and capsule commentaries on important cases add color to the main text. Both authors are committed to jargon-free, comprehensible prose. They begin by setting out the document’s framework and comment incisively on the novel concept of a written constitution deriving its authority from the people, ensuring checks and balances by separating power among the federal branches, while at the same time preserving state prerogatives. They move on to a careful, Article-by-Article explication of the respective powers of the federal government’s three branches and a detailed treatment of the Bill of Rights, “practically a second Constitution.” For the most part, the Paulsens praise the framers’ handiwork, even as they acknowledge the morally deficient protections for slavery contained in various Constitutional provisions. They devote the bulk of their narrative to a compressed, evenhanded history of the Constitution’s interpretation and the ongoing struggle to wrestle meaning from the words at the heart of our democracy. No important case goes unmentioned, no significant crisis or controversy unexplored. Some readers will quarrel with the authors’ insistence on the immutability of the Constitution’s words or perhaps with their commentary on particular cases, especially Roe v. Wade, Marbury v. Madison, and United States v. Nixon. Many will be surprised at their insistence that constitutional interpretation is not solely the province of the courts. All will appreciate the modesty and clarity they bring to this hugely complex subject. The Paulsens urge readers on to further reading and study, but they accomplish precisely what they set out to do.
A well-conceived, well-executed primer, ideal for a bright high schooler, a college student, or even the odd professor who requires a brush up on the Constitution.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-05372-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
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