A majestic biography of the man who shed his Ku Klux Klan robes to become one of the most influential and liberal justices in Supreme Court history. Newman (Law/New York Univ.) spent 26 years researching Black's life, and the result is a massive work of uncommon depth and grace. In subtle, luminous prose, he describes Black's merchant-class childhood in Clay County, Ala., haunted by his drunkard father; his prosperous years as ``Ego'' Black, the personal-injury lawyer whose courtroom oratory and theatrical cross-examination style brought him statewide fame and a position in the Klan; his two terms as Alabama's senator, during which he transformed himself from an intolerant populist into a power-brokering New Dealer, well-versed in ancient classics and modern politics; and his 34 years on the Supreme Court, championing the Bill of Rights and judicial restraint. Newman plainly reveres his subject, but he is clear-eyed and sometimes critical: He presents Black's various self- contradictory rationalizations for having served as KKK ``Kladd'' (whose job it is to induct new members into the Invisible Empire), then notes that Black ``never really grasped, or could admit, the genuine outrage that the Klan caused, and not only among Catholics, Jews and Negroes.'' Newman also criticizes Black's failure to grasp ``the profound meaning gathered within the Fourth Amendment's words'' (forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures). But he celebrates and illuminates the rest of the enormous body of Black's jurisprudence, which includes the ideas that the Bill of Rights applies in its entirety to the states and that the First Amendment right of free speech is ``absolute.'' The author is equally astute in analyzing Black's complex relationships with his depressive first wife, Josephine, the brilliant but libertine Justice William O. Douglas, and the devious and divisive Justice Felix Frankfurter. More than just a major contribution to Supreme Court history: a master's finely etched portrait of an American hero. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43180-2
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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