Well reasoned and argued, if unlikely to influence the people who could most stand to read it.
Elect a president, get a war.
By the lights of legal scholar Irons (Political Science/Univ. of California, San Diego; A People’s History of the Supreme Court, 1999, etc.), the U.S. has gone to war with a proper, constitutionally watertight declaration five times in its history as against “scores of undeclared wars and military incursions into other nations . . . in places as close as Mexico and as remote as Afghanistan.” The last formal declaration occurred on December 7, 1941, the dawn of the superimperial age of American empire; in the last war, which George W. Bush launched against Iraq, he didn’t bother working the Congress to do that job, as the Constitution demands, but instead announced what he intended and got a green-light resolution, much as his father had done in 1991. Congress gave him what he wanted, Irons asserts, because that’s what Congress does these days; no one wants to make a fuss about constitutional niceties, which is why the Patriot Act sailed through so easily. Incidental to his larger purpose, Irons imagines a scenario in which antiwar protestors are ipso facto declared guilty of domestic terrorism, a prospect that he believes true to “the government’s penchant for stifling legitimate criticism during wartime”; the Supreme Court’s behavior in recent years, he suggests, gives little reason to think that it couldn’t happen. The presidential fiat has long precedent, Irons writes, perhaps most powerfully in Abraham Lincoln’s wartime suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, which in turn afforded Franklin Roosevelt’s government legal authority to round up Japanese American citizens in that last declared war. Irons strikes notes of gloom throughout what is a thought-provoking treatise, observing that John Kerry seems not to have questioned the idea that a president can wing it when it comes to war, and lamenting the outcome of the last election as proof that the American people want their thinking done for them by somebody else—and that they’re happy with the unconstitutional application of American power.
Well reasoned and argued, if unlikely to influence the people who could most stand to read it.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7593-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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