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 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
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