Though the pairing of Lincoln and Taney seems at first unpromising, this story is as timely as it is well-written.
An examination of the differences over the Constitution’s meaning that separated Abraham Lincoln, most revered president, from Roger Taney, most reviled Chief Justice.
Honorable and gentlemanly, deeply religious (he freed his own slaves) and widely learned, Taney succeeded John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His intense partisanship perfectly served Andrew Jackson, first as Attorney General in Old Hickory’s battle against the National Bank, and later on the Court, where Taney had no problem reading expansive presidential power into the Constitution in the service of Jackson’s political agenda. In the run-up to the Civil War, however, Taney’s southern, aristocratic, agrarian heritage conspired toward a cramped reading of the Constitution, culminating most infamously in Dred Scott, where he declared that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Taney’s flawed moral reasoning and tragic miscalculation—he believed authoritative word from the Supreme Court would end the slavery debate—are well known. Less well known is how at every succeeding, important legal turn for the country—from the suppression of the writ of habeas corpus, to the blockading of domestic ports, to the expanded use of military commissions, to the Legal Tender Act, to the censoring of newspapers and mail—Taney fought virtually every controversial step taken by Lincoln, first to oppose secession and then to fight the rebellion. Simon (Constitutional Law/New York Law School; What Kind of Nation, 2002, etc.) skillfully charts the battles that pitted Taney’s acute legal mind against Lincoln’s transcendent one. Having landed on the wrong side of history, Taney would appear beyond rehabilitation, and Simon’s attempt to style him as a champion of civil liberties—ignoring as it does the Chief’s underlying political animus—is finally unpersuasive. Still, today’s opponents of enhanced Executive power might prick up their ears at Taney’s conviction that the Lincoln administration “abandoned the rule of law in favor of military domination.”
Though the pairing of Lincoln and Taney seems at first unpromising, this story is as timely as it is well-written.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5032-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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
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
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