Brookhiser’s book may be overshadowed by Joel Richard Paul’s recently published Without Precedent, a lengthy and...
A brief biography of a legendary chief justice.
When John Marshall (1755-1835) was sworn in as chief justice in 1801, writes National Review senior editor and biographer Brookhiser (Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, 2014, etc.), the Supreme Court met in a small committee room of the U.S. Capitol under the House of Representatives, a strong indication that the judiciary was the weakest of the three branches of the federal government. Yet before his death more than three decades later, “he and the Court he led had…laid down principles of laws and politics that still apply.” The oldest of 15 children, Marshall had only two years of formal schooling; his true education came with his service under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Marshall thought Washington was “the greatest Man on earth” and used Washington’s selfless patriotism as a guide for the rest of his life. Following the war, Marshall established a law practice and served as a Virginia ratifying convention delegate, congressman, diplomat, and secretary of state. His lengthy tenure as chief justice was marked by vigorous defenses of the sanctity of contracts (Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819), the supremacy of the federal judiciary (Marbury v. Madison, 1803), and the protection of federal institutions from state interference (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819). Yet more important than the individual decisions, notes Brookhiser, were the “dignity” that Marshall gave to the Supreme Court and his defense of the Constitution “as the people’s supreme act.” As for the man himself, Marshall was an affable sort who enjoyed his madeira and was devoted to his long-suffering wife, Polly. The author also provides absorbing character sketches of several of Marshall’s all-but-forgotten legal contemporaries, including Luther Martin, William Pinkney, and Samuel Chase.
Brookhiser’s book may be overshadowed by Joel Richard Paul’s recently published Without Precedent, a lengthy and well-received study of Marshall’s life and times. Nevertheless, those looking for a concise, informative, and at times entertaining biography of our nation’s fourth chief justice would do well to read this one.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09622-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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