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WITHOUT PRECEDENT

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES

A well-informed, perceptive, and absorbing biography of a titan of American history.

A biography of the fourth and greatest chief justice of the United States.

John Marshall (1755-1835) was no patrician. The eldest of 15 children born to an impoverished Virginia farmer, he had only a few months of formal education but served as a foot soldier at Valley Forge, a commissioner to France during the XYZ Affair, secretary of state to John Adams, and finally chief justice, a post to which Adams appointed him to resist the partisans of incoming president Thomas Jefferson. As Paul (Constitutional and International Law/Univ. of California Hastings Law School; Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution, 2008) notes, Marshall took over a court that "was regarded as nothing more than a constitutional afterthought [with]…few cases, little dignity, and no genuine authority." He bolstered the court's prestige by inventing the majority decision and produced more than 1,000 unanimous decisions during his tenure, a testimony to his skills of persuasion and compromise. Often employing a form of political judo, Marshall expanded the authority of his court and the central government by establishing fundamental constitutional principles like judicial review, taken for granted today but hotly contested in that era, to the impotent rage of his partisan opponents. In his conduct of the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr, Marshall infuriated Jefferson but arguably "did more to secure free expression and prevent tyranny than any other court in our history." Much of the story necessarily focuses on abstruse issues in constitutional law, but the author turns this potential narrative problem into a strength by emphasizing the politics and personal stories underlying the court's landmark cases. He cheerfully draws readers into the factual and legal complexities involved, employing an easygoing prose style that neither condescends nor bogs down in legalese. As much as Paul admires Marshall, he doesn't shrink from exposing holes in his reasoning, occasional ethically dodgy procedure, and a sometimes dismayingly amoral approach to the law.

A well-informed, perceptive, and absorbing biography of a titan of American history.

Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-59448-823-8

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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