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THE CONFIRMATION MESS

CLEANING UP THE FEDERAL APPOINTMENTS PROCESS

An evenhanded, thoughtful, but ultimately frustrating analysis of the sound-bite-driven confirmation process, by a scholar who regularly ventures into the public debate. Carter (Law/Yale; The Culture of Disbelief, 1993) analyzes some recent unfair campaigns (Robert Bork and Lani Guinier) and offers useful historical context. The Founders never intended rubber-stamp approval of Cabinet appointees, he writes; but the growth in presidential autonomy that began during the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes in the late 1870s means that only the imputation of exaggerated sins (``borking'') has any impact against nominees these days. He tartly points out that Senator Edward Kennedy, defending the much maligned Supreme Court nominee Thurgood Marshall, said it was inappropriate to probe judicial philosophy but did an about-face with Bork. Carter criticizes litmus tests for court nominees, since they enshrine policy, not philosophy. He proposes that the Senate pursue several lines of inquiry: the candidate's qualifications; the respect of the public (which, he indicates, would have been the kiss of death for Clarence Thomas); immoral conduct (memberships in discriminatory private clubs); illegal conduct (but weighed against the importance of the law and the severity of the violation); unethical conduct (violation of professional standards of conduct). He suggests that some proposed reforms—such as that the Senate supply a list of possible nominees or an amendment requiring a two- thirds majority for approval—might help, while others—no TV cameras at hearings or election of judges—wouldn't. Carter's subtitle is, ultimately, a dodge, as he acknowledges that ``so few of the proposed repairs would make much difference.'' If we should learn to think of public service as a reward, not a calling, and the Supreme Court as a check on majority tyranny rather than a parallel force of public will, then shouldn't he have written more about how to change public attitudes?

Pub Date: May 31, 1994

ISBN: 0-465-01364-3

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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