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COURTING JUSTICE

GAY MEN AND LESBIANS V. THE SUPREME COURT

A telling story of justice’s grinding wheels, and a crackerjack resource volume on gay legal history. (8 pp. photos, not...

The unsettled legalities of gay rights—seen through the lens of Supreme Court decisions—are fully and fascinatingly explored by Detroit News journalists Murdoch and Price (And Say Hi to Joyce, 1995).

As Murdoch and Price make amply clear, the Supreme Court has “determined not to be an engine driving social change in the area of gay rights.” While the authors appreciate that the judiciary is a deliberative (rather than executive) body, they fault it nevertheless for having “been a drag on the nation, holding back the pace of progress toward the full acceptance of gay people.” The court is notoriously secretive, so Murdoch and Price pulled together their materials from the National Archives, newspapers, justices’ papers, and (perhaps most significantly) interviews with the principals and the justices’ clerks. Starting with the court’s decision in favor of One, The Homosexual Magazine in 1958, and continuing through the ruling that upheld the dismissal of a gay scoutmaster in 2000, Murdoch and Price explain the constitutional issues involved—from freedom and fairness to privacy and free speech and due process. In the process they provide a primer on the ways of the Supreme Court—its curious isolation from the involved parties and each justice’s isolation from all the others—and sketch the personalities of William O. Douglas, John Paul Stevens, William J. Brennan, and many others. They include Brennan’s dissenting opinion in a case involving the dismissal of a bisexual schoolteacher, Kameny’s 1960 formulation of “an equal-rights position that would provide much of the intellectual underpinnings for what would be known as the gay-rights movement,” and an examination of sodomy law and its infringement “on the right of privacy and free association.” Among the historical tidbits included is a 1950s New York Times headline: “Perverts Called Government Peril.”

A telling story of justice’s grinding wheels, and a crackerjack resource volume on gay legal history. (8 pp. photos, not seen)

Pub Date: June 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-465-01513-1

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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