Kalman presents an accessible, lucid brief on how our Supreme Court appointment system became the mess that it is.
A historically driven explanation for how the Supreme Court appointment process got to be where it is today.
In this important history of the nation’s highest court, Kalman (History/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980, 2010, etc.), a former president of the American Society for Legal History, argues that in a very short period of time, spanning the latter years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and the beginning of the Nixon administration, the nature of Supreme Court appointments was utterly transformed. Throughout, she effectively “grounds the efforts by LBJ and Nixon to shape the Court in the political history of their Presidencies.” In the author’s telling, conservatives managed to depict the Supreme Court under Earl Warren, which had been vital for its rulings on black civil rights, the rights of the accused, and so much more, as radically activist—despite the fact that the Warren court was no more “activist” (an ideologically loaded term with little real meaning) than the courts that preceded it or the courts that followed and, more importantly, that the court’s decisions during Warren’s tenure as chief justice tended to adhere closely to public opinion. Kalman argues that a series of contentious (including some failed) nominations from both Johnson and Nixon served to deeply politicize the nomination and confirmation processes, the effects of which she traces through future presidencies. Not all legal history is as readable as this, nor is it as crisply argued without turgid legalese. The author uses a wide range of presidential and judicial archives and mines the presidential recordings from both LBJ’s and Nixon’s White Houses. The author successfully locates the nexus between legal and political history and makes a compelling case for the period in question being a clear and vital turning point.
Kalman presents an accessible, lucid brief on how our Supreme Court appointment system became the mess that it is.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-995822-1
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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 Yorker staff 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
