Yoshino claims that he was riveted by the 3,000-page trial transcript; his cogent, incisive narrative is equally captivating.
The story of a crucial trial to legitimize same-sex marriage.
As in his earlier book on civil rights, Covering (2006), legal scholar Yoshino (Constitutional Law/New York Univ. School of Law; A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice, 2011, etc.) interweaves autobiography into a crisp, shrewd analysis of Hollingsworth v. Perry, the 12-day federal trial that considered California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. A gay Asian-American, Yoshino married in 2009 as the suit was filed in California, and he and his husband became parents of a daughter and son during the four years of litigation. Centered on issues of love, commitment and family, the trial had personal as well as political and professional meaning for him. Its transcript, he writes, “captured the best conversation I had seen on same-sex marriage—better than any legislative hearing, any academic debate, or any media exchange.” The transcript contained intellectually rigorous arguments, pointed cross-examination of witnesses’ claims and allegations, and intense focus on points of law. Trials about gay rights issues, as one judge noted, were educational experiences that offered “an excellent opportunity to replace ignorance with knowledge.” In the Prop 8 case, Judge Vaughn Walker insisted on moving quickly to trial; he also wanted the proceedings streamed live to federal courthouses and posted on YouTube—both of which were blocked by the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs were represented by Ted Olson and David Boies, who had argued against each other in Bush v. Gore. The “inspired” pairing of the two savvy strategists, the author contends, “symbolically reunited the two halves of the country.” Besides chronicling testimony by experts and witnesses, Yoshino clearly explains relevant legal terms and identifies the three rationales that ultimately became prominent in the case: “optimal child rearing, the prevention of the dissolution of marriage, and the suppression of irresponsible procreation.”
Yoshino claims that he was riveted by the 3,000-page trial transcript; his cogent, incisive narrative is equally captivating.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-34880-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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