A welcome, timely, ideal primer.
A compact, concise, and highly relevant civics lesson.
There have been a number of books published about impeachment, many of them partisan manifestoes. What makes Sunstein’s (University Professor/Harvard Law School; #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, 2017) book of such great interest is its lack of fanfare and knife-sharpening. The author is a learned and accessible guide as he maneuvers his way through the history of democracy’s nuclear option. To impeach is a “national nightmare, a body blow to the republic.” He notes that Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and their colleagues “thought a lot about impeachment,” which was at the “core of the founders’ intricate and majestic effort to balance the defining republican commitments to liberty, equality and self-rule with the belief in a strong, energetic national government.” The how-to is clearly laid out in the Constitution—the House impeaches, the Senate convicts—but for what is less clear. A brief debate resulted in the purposefully vague “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” After taking a side street down “Interpreting the Constitution,” Sunstein examines the impeachments acted upon by the House (of mostly judges). A weak try to impeach President John Tyler failed in 1842. Andrew Johnson was famously impeached in 1868 by a vote of 126-47; he was acquitted. The Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Richard Nixon along party lines, but he resigned before a House vote. As the author writes, the “impeachment of Bill Clinton is almost incomprehensible,” and he is harsh on Kenneth Starr’s prosecutor’s report: “If it were a movie, you wouldn’t bring your children.” Like a good lawyer, Sunstein compiles a detailed list of hypothetical cases for impeachment, some easy, some harder. Though we may not need to “focus on the impeachment mechanism,” writes the author, “we do need to know about it. It’s our fail-safe, our shield, our sword—our ultimate weapon for self-defense.”
A welcome, timely, ideal primer.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-98379-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
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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