A powerful warning about the future of constitutional government and an indictment of the ways it has been undermined in the...
Edelson (Government/American Univ.; Emergency Presidential Power: From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror, 2013) raises troubling questions about the Barack Obama administration.
The author, who specializes in constitutional history, points to President Obama's failure to put his money where his mouth was during the 2008 election campaign when he refused to hold accountable those who had violated both domestic and international law during the administration of George W. Bush. Edelson faults Obama for failing to seriously challenge the arbitrary willfulness of rule by presidential prerogative, which violates both the Founders’ intent and the Constitution's allocation of the president's powers. This failure, writes the author, may encourage future presidents in the belief they can “safely set aside laws.” Obama did follow through on his opposition to torture when he issued an executive order banning the practice and reaffirmed the authority of the Army’s field manuals. However, he failed to hold anyone accountable for breaches. Not doing so, Edelson argues, “is itself a failure to impose limits on presidential power.” Furthermore, the absence of enforcement has “effectively vindicated” the prior administration's prerogative-based argument that it could authorize and carry out torture with impunity. The author compares the Obama administration's words and actions to the institutional guidelines created by the Bush administration, and in no area has there been fundamental change. An administration dedicated to transparency has used secrecy consistently to protect itself from scrutiny by the court system or press, and Congress has acquiesced. Charges have not been brought against those who carried out torture, nor have investigations been launched to find the truth. Among present legal experts, Edelson references those who suggest, “under Obama, as under Bush, ours is no longer a government under law. It is a government of options,” adopted at presidential whim.
A powerful warning about the future of constitutional government and an indictment of the ways it has been undermined in the recent past.Pub Date: May 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-30740-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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