Useful ammunition for an argument on gun rights at the bar or dinner table.
A thoroughgoing survey of that most troublesome of constitutional matters.
Recent court decisions, from the lower municipal to the highest in the land, have held the Second Amendment right of gun ownership to be sacrosanct, never mind that pesky “well-regulated militia” bit. The National Rifle Association, for its part, has argued that the Second Amendment is the most important in the Bill of Rights, protecting all others. But, writes Lichtman (History/American Univ.; The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present, 2018, etc.), Founding Father James Madison didn’t see it that way: He held instead that “the ‘essential rights’ are trial by jury and freedom of conscience, speech, and the press.” Past interpretation of the amendment did in fact connect it to the militia, subsequently replaced by the National Guard and therefore, in theory, rendered moot. Instead, as Lichtman enumerates in just one statistic, nearly 24,000 Americans die of gun suicide, something that rarely happens in other developed nations with strict firearms codes. As he notes, our constitutional right to keep arms is shared only with Guatemala, “whose gun murder rate is the third highest of some 195 countries worldwide”). The NRA was once a responsible hunters’ organization. Since the 1960s, not coincidentally the civil rights era, it has become a lobbying firm that protects arms manufacturers’ interests by battling any efforts at gun control—and not just here, but also in places such as Canada and Brazil, the latter of which “has by far the most firearms homicides and deaths of any country in the world.” As for Americans, we are far more likely to be murdered by gun than a resident of any of the G7 nations—more than 20 times per capita, in fact, adding Australia to those nations. What can be done? Short of repeal outright, Lichtman sensibly suggests strengthening background checks, limiting gun sales, and holding gun manufacturers legally accountable for the nefarious uses of their products.
Useful ammunition for an argument on gun rights at the bar or dinner table.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-25-024440-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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