A deeply informed analysis of judicial history.
An esteemed jurist assesses the limitations of textualism.
Breyer, who retired in 2022 after 28 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, offers a cogent explanation of judicial reasoning, focusing particularly on the difference between textualism—now dominating the current Court—and pragmatism, which is his guiding principle. In making decisions, all judges consider “text, history, precedent, tradition, purposes, values, and consequences.” Textualists, though, “ask the judge to look, almost exclusively, to language. And their main point is that statutory (or constitutional) words mean what a reasonable person would have taken them to mean at the time they were written.” Breyer, however, sees this perspective as myopic. “Without ignoring the text,” he explains, “I normally put more weight on the statute’s purposes and the consequences to which a particular interpretation will likely lead. I will sometimes ask how a (hypothetical) ‘reasonable legislator’ would have interpreted the statute in light of its purposes.” He also considers “how those affected by the decision will react.” The author carefully examines many cases throughout the Court’s history, including Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and cases for which he wrote the dissenting view. He argues persuasively that overruling earlier precedent can lead to chaos, because in departing from settled law, “the court could look at all previous decisions.” Breyer’s patient explanation of cases reveals the intricacies of judicial decision-making, even for textualists, who focus on the “highly complex” wording of the Constitution. Although he argues persuasively against textualism, he is reluctant to foresee a paradigm shift toward textualism incited by the present Court. Cautiously optimistic, he predicts that with time and experience, the new Court judges will realize the limitations of this approach and understand that “the ultimate object of law is to allow human beings to live peacefully and prosperously together in communities.”
A deeply informed analysis of judicial history.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781668021538
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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