A damning account of a Supreme Court gone wildly activist in shredding the Constitution.
Alarming exposé of the Supreme Court’s “hard right supermajority.”
Along with legislatures stripping minorities of civil and voting rights and gerrymandering safe districts, the Supreme Court, writes NYU School of Law scholar Waldman, is among the foremost “threats to American democracy.” While in office, Donald Trump installed three Supreme Court justices who have transformed the moderate Roberts court into an extreme right-wing institution that, in just three days in June 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade, forbade federal agencies from addressing climate change, and “radically loosened curbs on guns, amid an epidemic of mass shootings.” These actions, Waldman fears, are just the beginning of a struggle over the meaning of the Constitution—a struggle fought, by his reckoning, three times before, most recently in rulings concerning civil rights after Brown v. Board of Education. The current court is focused on “originalism,” which involves trying to “discern exactly what the Founders were thinking.” However, Waldman urges, the Founders assumed that the Constitution would be frequently amended to reflect social change. One great reform came in the 19th century to extend the power of the Bill of Rights to state-level as well as federal actions. Today, with the sullenly taciturn Clarence Thomas and his election-denying spouse at the center of the court, stripping rights, Waldman charges, is the order of the day. In an institution with almost no ethical controls, “Thomas managed to run afoul of the few existing rules that govern conduct.” Waldman counsels a program to sidestep the Supreme Court not by packing it, as some have urged, but instead by strengthening lower courts (Justice John Roberts himself having called for 79 new federal judges), limit court tenure to 18 years instead of a lifetime appointment, and concentrate on building a progressive legislative branch.
A damning account of a Supreme Court gone wildly activist in shredding the Constitution.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781668006061
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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