Uplifting, well-written story of personal courage and political empowerment.
The moving personal stories behind the landmark Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which established the right of same-sex couples to marry in all 50 states.
While the major 2013 Supreme Court decision of United States v. Windsor had struck down key discriminatory provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act, there remained some shadowy spaces still not defined for the equal protection of gay couples. In this affecting, eloquent account, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Cenziper (Washington Post) and the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, civil rights activist Obergefell, re-create the events and legal precedent that began in Cincinnati shortly after the Windsor decision, involving Obergefell and his longtime partner and husband, John Arthur, who died in 2013. Having defended such unpopular causes as abortion clinics and discrimination against gay employees, crusading Cincinnati lawyer Al Gerhardstein resolved to launch a federal lawsuit against the state of Ohio in order to allow Obergefell to be listed on Arthur’s death certificate as “surviving spouse,” although their marriage was not recognized by Ohio, where a referendum a decade earlier had banned the recognition of same-sex marriages. While the ban on anti-discrimination laws for gays was declared unconstitutional by the city of Cincinnati, the conservative 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision in 1995, then again in 2014, refusing to recognize gay couples (who had married in another state) on death certificates and the birth certificates of their children. Essentially, the court forced Gerhardstein’s hand, and he petitioned the Supreme Court, which, astoundingly, took the case, narrowing the issue down to two questions: “whether the Constitution required all fifty states to issue marriage licenses to people of the same sex and whether states with bans should be required to recognize marriages that were legally performed elsewhere.” The authors ably create the suspense of anticipation and winnow the legal issues for lay readers.
Uplifting, well-written story of personal courage and political empowerment.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-245608-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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