A coolly delivered small-focus study.
A lively treatise on the most offensive word in the English language, from a renowned expert on civil rights and black legal history (Race, Crime, and the Law, 1997).
Jumping off from a series of lectures he gave in 1999, Harvard Law Professor Kennedy explores with care the cultural, social, and legal significance of the powerful N-word. He looks at the unique staying-power of this highly charged term, asking why and how so forbidden an expression of race hate has come to also be used, in various forms, as an expression of esteem, power, and affection. Kennedy gives an account of the word’s origin and history in 17th-century America, examines revealing court cases in which it has figured, and in a chapter entitled “Pitfalls in Fighting Nigger” analyzes the various efforts on campus and in the workplace to inhibit its use. He has a well-tuned ear for the diverse ways the word has infiltrated the American vernacular, and strong views about the many PC arguments that have swirled around the issues it raises; he cites many wrongful abuses of the term, but tends to be critical of excessive measures taken by some to control or punish offensive speech. Rap music, TV shows, films, and books also get the treatment, with discussions of many familiar black artists, from Spike Lee to Bill Cosby to Tupac Shakur, and commentary on the edgy, self-deprecating humor of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, and the stars of Def Comedy Jam, as well as the long-running controversy over the ’50s TV sitcom Amos ’n’ Andy, which featured black stereotypes. Kennedy is at his best, however, when describing and interpreting legal cases, and his explanations of relevant courtroom dramas move it all along as he guides the reader to an understanding of the “mere words” and “fighting words” doctrines that have helped shape legal thinking on the subject. While some seasoned readers of black history may feel there’s not much here about “nigger” they don’t already know, Kennedy’s knack for storytelling and his overall smarts make this a very enjoyable one-sitting affair.
A coolly delivered small-focus study.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42172-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
“Ideology is fairy tales for adults.” Thus writes economist and conservative maven Sowell in a best-of volume shot through with…ideology.
Though he resists easy categorization, the author has been associated with hard-libertarian organizations and think tanks such as the Hoover Institution for most of his long working life. Here he picks from his numerous writings, which have the consistency of an ideologue—e.g., affirmative action is bad, period. It’s up to parents, not society or the schools, to be sure that children are educated. Ethnic studies and the “mania for ‘diversity’ ” produce delusions. Colleges teach impressionable Americans to “despise American society.” Minimum-wage laws are a drag on the economy. And so on. Sowell is generally fair-minded, reasonable and logical, but his readers will likely already be converts to his cause, for which reason he does not need to examine all the angles of a problem. (If it is true that most gun violence is committed in households where domestic abuse has taken place, then why not take away the abusers’ guns as part of the legal sentencing?) Often his arguments are very smart, as when he examines the career of Booker T. Washington, who was adept in using white people’s money to advance his causes while harboring no illusions that his benefactors were saints. Sometimes, though, Sowell’s sentiments emerge as pabulum, as when he writes, in would-be apothegms: “Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can’t stop with just one”; “I can understand why some people like to drive slowly. What I cannot understand is why they get in the fast lane to do it.” The answer to the second question, following Sowell, might go thus: because they’re liberals and the state tells them to do it, just to get in the way of hard-working real Americans. A solid, representative collection by a writer and thinker whom one either agrees with or not—and there’s not much middle ground on which to stand.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-02250-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
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