Not entirely the partisan screed that you’d expect, not especially provocative, but enlightening and in some places...
Attempting to support his alarmist view of how life would degrade under the sway of extreme right-wing judges, Sunstein (The Second Bill of Rights, 2004, etc.) nevertheless presents a surprisingly balanced history of constitutional law.
Sunstein (Jurisprudence/Univ. of Chicago Law School) warns that legal fundamentalists, who interpret the Constitution according to the “original understanding,” that is, how the framers and ratifiers conceived it, would deprive us of many of the freedoms and protections that we now take for granted. Fundamentalist courts would, for example, overturn Roe v. Wade on the basis that the Constitution does not protect privacy, strike as unconstitutional key provisions of anti-discrimination laws such as the Civil Rights Act and environmental safeguards such as the Clean Air Act, permit states to bar women from practicing as doctors or lawyers, declare even modest gun control laws invalid, scale back the rights of the accused, shield commercial advertising from government regulation and poke giant doorways in the wall that separates church and state. In fact, states could establish official religions. Sunstein’s most compelling argument against fundamentalism is that the framers and ratifiers were only human, so the Constitution can’t be perfect. Sunstein, however, does not establish a strong one-to-one correspondence between fundamentalism and extreme right-wing politics, other than to say that Justice Antonin Scalia, the most conservative member of the U.S. Supreme Court, is a fundamentalist. Not until near the end does he state, without much support, “The constitutional judgments of fundamentalists are eerily close to the political judgments of conservative politicians.” His evidence that courts are generally shifting to the extreme right is also weak. Sunstein promotes a minimalist approach to constitutional law, which allows that it’s okay to nudge the law carefully in one direction or another (right or left) with incremental decisions, rather than overreach, as he believes the Supreme Court did in Roe v. Wade.
Not entirely the partisan screed that you’d expect, not especially provocative, but enlightening and in some places fascinating.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-08326-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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