Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy’s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.
A collection of essays on Black politics and history by a noted legal scholar.
Early on, Harvard Law School professor Kennedy observes that “social relations are complex and messy.” This is true, and people are complex and messy as well. One of Kennedy’s subjects, for example, is Frederick Douglass, who transformed himself from “racial pessimist” to “the most remarkable racial optimist in American history,” having first viewed the Constitution as a thinly disguised instrument of slavery and then taken the view that, under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, the document was actually anti-slavery in nature, at least in part. Language changes, too. Having lived through several eras, Kennedy calls himself a “Black/Negro/Colored/African American” man born in the year of Brown v. Board of Education. In an essay that is certain to raise consternation among some readers, Kennedy defends the use of the N-word “for pedagogical purposes,” writing, “I am simply unwilling to defer to arbiters of opinion who, armed with superficial knowledge, rigidly insist that this or that term is correct or incorrect in the face of a rich and complicated historical record that reveals a wide pattern of usages.” He adds that a lawyer distracted by the ugly language of the N-word or similar racial slurs “is a lawyer with a gaping vulnerability.” Other pieces that are less likely to invite debate concern the role of policing in Black neighborhoods. In Kennedy's view, the problem is less the police per se than “poorly regulated police” whose role is to threaten and control more than to protect and serve. Some of the pieces are of a historical survey nature: telling readers who Elijah Muhammad was, reviewing the runaway slave law of the pre–Civil War era, and so forth. They are less memorable than the author’s denunciations of “antiracism gone awry” and small-step racial justice laws that “are attentive to the pluralism that infuses American practices.”
Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy’s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31604-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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