Recommended particularly for attorneys and other legal professionals who can appreciate, analyze, and critique the author's...
An influential legal commentator grapples with the jurisprudential legacy of Antonin Scalia (1936-2016).
During his lengthy tenure on the Supreme Court, Scalia promoted two approaches to interpreting statutes and the Constitution, textualism and originalism, with the aim of limiting what he saw as unprincipled judicial activism through the use of more objective analytical methods. Hasen (Law and Political Science/Univ. of California, Irvine; Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, 2016, etc.) argues that while Scalia was very successful in promoting both approaches in courts and law schools, neither provide the benefits Scalia claimed for them and Scalia himself was inconsistent in their use. "Scalia tried to have it both ways,” writes the author, “by describing himself as bound by strong neutral principles, and then bending those principles to adhere to other principles, such as ideology or respect for precedent." Hasen effectively supports his critique with incisive analysis of pertinent cases and legal commentary, clearly explaining the fundamental theoretical and practical weaknesses of these methodologies. While Scalia could be charming in person, his legal writing was notorious for an overbearing and sarcastic attitude, especially in dissent. His slashing prose style certainly called attention to his views, but Hasen contends that by attacking other justices personally and questioning their intelligence and motivations, he contributed to a coarsening of legal discourse and unnecessarily "took aim at the legitimacy of the Supreme Court's decisionmaking," all to the court's detriment. In later chapters, the author addresses Scalia's approach to cases involving such politically controversial topics as affirmative action and campaign financing, and here his arguments are on shakier ground. Hasen seems to disapprove of the jurisprudence of this conservative justice on largely ideological grounds, and his discussion of these topics frequently swerves from careful analysis to partisan advocacy.
Recommended particularly for attorneys and other legal professionals who can appreciate, analyze, and critique the author's viewpoint for themselves.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-22864-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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