Though accessible to nonspecialist readers, primarily of interest to those already well versed in constitutional law and...
Legal scholars address the complex matter of the 2000 presidential election, lending weight to those who see its outcome as a judicial coup.
For those who have tried to put it out of their minds, Dworkin (Law/NYU and Philosophy/ University College, London; Sovereign Virtue, 2000) offers a helpful summary of that misbegotten election, held on November 7: a close call of votes in Florida and allegations of vote fraud and misleadingly constructed ballots led candidate Al Gore to follow the provisions of Florida law and demand a manual recount in four counties; Florida secretary of state and George W. Bush campaign official Katherine Harris refused to extend the deadline when the recount was not completed on time; suits and countersuits followed; on December 12, the US Supreme Court voted to end the recount, thereby awarding the election to Bush. In a spry and subtle argument, conservative jurist and legal scholar Richard Posner offers a worst-case analysis of what might have happened had the Court not decided so: in the face of an apparently unbreakable deadlock (inasmuch as candidate Bush’s brother, the governor of Florida, might not have certified a Gore victory after a recount), the US Congress would have had to declare an acting president, probably Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers; absent the Court’s “pragmatic adjudication,” the country would thereupon have been plunged into a constitutional crisis. Such a crisis, Dworkin retorts, would not necessarily be a bad thing, and in any event, the Court’s decision was a conservative fiat that shamed the nation more than any back-and-forth in courts and Congress would have. Laurence Tribe, Lani Guinier, Richard Pildes, Nelson Polsby, and Cass Sunstein examine other aspects of the Court’s decision, while historian Arthur Schlesinger sketches out a modification of the present winner-take-all Electoral College system so that the winner of the popular vote—in this instance Gore—is henceforth more likely to earn the electoral vote as well.
Though accessible to nonspecialist readers, primarily of interest to those already well versed in constitutional law and electoral procedure.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-737-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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