The explicit subtitle will likely dissuade some, but Chemerinsky’s rock-solid arguments are rooted in history, in a profound...
The veteran author of numerous volumes about the Constitution and the courts returns with a close look at our founding document through progressive eyes.
Chemerinsky (Dean, Univ. of California School of Law; Closing the Courthouse Door: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable, 2017, etc.) pulls no punches. In the first sentence he mentions the “devastating” election of Donald Trump, and throughout he expresses deep concern about the certain consequent conservative bent of the Supreme Court. After some initial comments about the state of the Constitution today—and the challenges to progressives—he guides us through the document, emphasizing what he identifies as key provisions and pointing out where he thinks the Supreme Court has succeeded and where it has erred. One crucial point he raises continually: the significance of the Preamble, for it is there, he argues, that the values of the document (and of us) reside, and yet the court tends to ignore that portion of the Constitution, basing decisions on articles and amendments. Chemerinsky believes this is a mistake and that the courts should apply the democratic values contained in the Preamble. After this section, the author moves through the document, examining such issues as the Electoral College (get rid of it, he says), federalism, the separation of powers, fairness in policing practices and court-imposed punishments, freedoms of religion and speech, privacy, affirmative action, and others. He balances his patent passion for the issues he has identified with scholarly documentation and many references to and descriptions of key court cases and decisions. Repeatedly, he praises the protections and social advances made possible by liberal justices and condemns the restrictions and corporate-friendly decisions of the conservatives. With modesty, he also admits his own losses in cases he argued before the court.
The explicit subtitle will likely dissuade some, but Chemerinsky’s rock-solid arguments are rooted in history, in a profound progressive philosophy.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16600-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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