A cogent, organized history of the beginnings of free speech in the United States.
Accessible study of America’s fierce devotion to freedom of speech through the vociferous public reactions to Britain’s perceived tyranny.
First Amendment scholar Solomon (Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York Univ.; Ellery's Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer, 2007, etc.) spotlights how Colonial citizens and patriots—e.g., minister John Wise, irrepressible newspapers editors, silversmith Paul Revere, farmer John Dickinson, and others—challenged the seditious libel law that the American Colonies had inherited from England. The inherited law prohibited political dissent that would sow discord or slander “between the King and his people” and was aimed at keeping the relationship between sovereign and subject intact. However, as Solomon reveals in orderly chapters, the colonists would not stand by quietly when taxed without self-representation, as first articulated by outspoken Puritan minister Wise in 1687 when he criticized Massachusetts Gov. Edmund Andros for imposing unfair tax policy. Normally, the fines and physical punishment would have been severe. However, with time, the citizen-held juries would not uphold the seditious libel law in court, much to the consternation of chief justice of Massachusetts and governor Thomas Hutchinson when trying to silence the radical Boston Gazette publishers, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, from criticizing him in an important case in 1767. Solomon looks at the rise of newspapers, “coffeehouse culture,” broadsides, political theater, cartoons, and even symbols such as effigies and the Liberty Tree in Boston as significant in whipping up public foment. They were all part of the Enlightenment convictions held by the framers that citizens of a democracy “required the freedom to speak freely and passionately on all the issues before them.” While the early American revolutionaries revered their freedom of expression as part of their patriotic duty, the subsequent legal challenges severely undermined those early libertarian impulses. Solomon follows the First Amendment arguments to the present.
A cogent, organized history of the beginnings of free speech in the United States.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-230-34206-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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