A well-researched, profoundly relevant story of a failed judicial nomination.
Li, a legal historian and journalist, examines the failed nomination of a Depression-era Supreme Court justice.
As the descendent of one of North Carolina’s most distinguished families, John J. Parker’s ancestors included Revolutionary War veterans, two governors (one was also a U.S. senator), and one of the first six justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Parker himself was nominated by President Herbert Hoover to the Supreme Court in 1930, most journalists and political insiders assumed his confirmation was a given. Yet, despite his pedigree and tenure as young judge, not to mention his connections to some of the South’s most powerful politicians, Parker’s nomination would go down as one of the most hotly contested failed appointments in history. Nominated during the peak of Jim Crow discrimination in the South and the nascent economic collapse associated with the Great Depression, Parker confronted intense opposition from Black civil rights activists and labor organizers. As a member of the Republican Party’s “lily-white” southern faction, Parker had previously declared his support of segregation and laws that severely limited the ability of Black Americans to vote. He had also taken legal stances against the United Mine Workers of America in favor of coal companies. These positions ignited a firestorm of pressure within the Republican Party, and Parker’s nomination would be rejected in a close vote. While the campaign to take down Parker is reported in fascinating detail, what truly stands out in this book are the connections Li makes between this ideological battle of 1930 to the later politicalization of Supreme Court nominees from Robert Bork to Brett Kavanaugh; the author argues that Parker set a precedent that would define nominations across going forward. An assistant managing editor of the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, host of the Legal Rebels Podcast, and author of a book on Richard Nixon’s electoral strategy, Li blends an absorbing, accessible writing style with solid research based largely on archival and primary sources.
A well-researched, profoundly relevant story of a failed judicial nomination.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9783032078636
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
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