An intensely readable, fully explored account of what the New York Times called an “ordeal by committee,” an important hinge...
Longtime journalist and biographer Haygood (The Butler: A Witness to History, 2013, etc.), whose previous subjects have included Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., examines the confirmation battle over the first African-American nominated to the Supreme Court.
During the summer of 1967, Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) appeared for an unprecedented fifth day before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This confrontation between arguably the most consequential appellate attorney ever and the “Old Bulls” who dominated the interrogating panel is both the spine of Haygood’s narrative and the occasion for a number of ancillary stories that lend blood and guts to the superficial civilities of a Senate hearing. So we learn about Lyndon Johnson’s backstage maneuvering, first to create an opening on the court and second, to devise a backup plan in case Marshall’s nomination faltered; Marshall’s surprisingly good rapport with J. Edgar Hoover and testy relations with Robert Kennedy; Marshall’s early life and undergraduate career (he was a classmate of Langston Hughes); his legal training under famed mentors Charles Hamilton Houston and William Hastie; his work for the NAACP and the signal civil rights cases that made his reputation; his controversial interracial marriage; publisher Henry Luce’s threat to Southern senators who held up Marshall’s earlier nomination to the court of appeals; and the extraordinary scrutiny accorded Marshall compared to previous Supreme Court nominees. Most interesting is Haygood’s presentation of the Southern Democrats—Arkansas’ John McClellan, Mississippi’s James Eastland, North Carolina’s Sam Ervin—who considered Marshall “a public enemy of the South” and who strove to embarrass him before the nation and to expose him as dangerous and ill-suited to the high court. The author’s almost wholly admiring portrait of Marshall unfortunately includes some occasionally excessive or inexact language, but the stories are so good the author is easily forgiven.
An intensely readable, fully explored account of what the New York Times called an “ordeal by committee,” an important hinge in American history.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-95719-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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