An opinionated but persuasive call to think a little more kindly of the highest court in the land.
A measured defense of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, writes lawyer and conservative activist Isgur, was unusual among the tangles of the federal government in being generally popular, with an approval rating of 70% as recently as 2020. Now, however, “for the first time, more people disapprove of the Court than approve of it.” This owes much to decisions that would seem to be politically driven, such as granting President Trump blanket immunity for acts committed in office that just might turn out to be illegal. It’s not as sweeping as all that, Isgur counsels: There’s still a distinction between official and private acts in play, and while it doesn’t help that the decision’s language is so vague that “the real answer is…that nobody knows,” the decision, she suggests, was less partisan than a protection against political persecution of the opposition—which is just what’s happening, albeit emanating from and not toward the White House. The central problem is both simple and deeply complex, and it turns on the fact that the legislative branch isn’t anywhere close to doing its job, allowing the executive to run rampant while putting the judiciary in the untenable position of making law rather than interpreting it. There are any number of remedies to the court’s ills, Isgur writes, including imposing “an enforceable ethics code.” Even more revolutionary might be a constitutional guarantee allowing each president to appoint two justices, so that the number on the bench might be as high as 13, assuming term limits are indeed set. But in the end, Isgur—who has good and evenhanded things to say about every currently sitting justice—demands that Congress, now constituting “one big dog and 434 yapping backbenchers with no hope of legislating their way into reelection or relevancy,” actually start doing what it’s in business to do.
An opinionated but persuasive call to think a little more kindly of the highest court in the land.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780593800928
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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