An absorbing story of the 16-year Senate siege to break the seemingly impregnable wall of resistance to civil rights for blacks—and of the three Democratic titans at the heart of that battle. In 1948, 37-year-old Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey called for the Democratic National Convention to ``get out of the shadows of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.'' The speech helped elect the ebullient Humphrey to the Senate later that year—and dismayed Richard Russell of Georgia, the South's segregationist bloc leader, fighting to delay what he knew was inevitable. Standing between the two was Lyndon Johnson, the cagey Senate majority leader who sought to balance his immediate need to get reelected in conservative Texas with his already burning aspirations for the Oval Office. While drawing on a rich vein of oral histories, archival materials, and interviews, Mann also uses his expertise as former press secretary to Louisiana senator Russell Long (whose life he chronicled in Legacy to Power, 1992) to explain how Russell used his mastery of Senate rules to defy fumbling liberal attempts to invoke cloture, the procedure used to limit the filibuster, the southern bloc's chief weapon. Johnson finally managed to jawbone, wheedle, and wheel-and-deal the Senate into producing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first legislation of its kind since Reconstruction. Russell agreed to stop an all-out filibuster, satisfied that he had allowed passage of a bill watered down enough for constituents but still substantive enough to help propel protÇgÇ Johnson into the White House. Once LBJ assumed the presidency from the slain John Kennedy, he used Humphrey, now majority whip, to pry Republican Everett Dirksen away from the Southern Democrats to support the far tougher Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A fascinating set of parallel lives detailing how the Senate shed its mulish ways to pass momentous legislation. (16 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100065-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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