Detailed and well considered: a welcome study of Blackmun’s contributions to the law.
The life and times of a Supreme Court justice who resisted easy categorization, then and now.
On his death in 1999, writes New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Greenhouse, Harry Blackmun gave the Library of Congress his papers, “contained in 1,585 boxes that take up more than six hundred feet.” Drawing on this wealth of primary information, Greenhouse turns in a nuanced study of Blackmun as legal thinker and judge. Along the way, she offers revealing notes on Warren Burger, whose own papers are sealed until 2026; Burger, Blackmun’s childhood friend and fellow Minnesotan, helped see Blackmun onto the bench. Other Minnesotans were guarded in their support: Walter Mondale dismissed him as a conservative, and Hubert Humphrey was not enthusiastic. Blackmun gave liberal critics reason for concern, as when he dissented from the opinion allowing the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers, remarking, “The First Amendment, after all, is only one part of an entire Constitution.” (A citizen from New Jersey wrote in to say, “I thought you were a ‘strict constructionist’. . . . More a strict Nixonist.”) Yet Blackmun also took it on himself to write the Court’s opinion on Roe v. Wade, interpreting it not simply from the woman’s-choice stance but also as “primarily, a medical decision.” Blackmun had to defend Roe v. Wade for the rest of his career, as a target of those who wished to outlaw abortion entirely; he was relieved when in 1992 five justices declared that “the essential holding of Roe v. Wade should be retained and once again reaffirmed.” Greenhouse observes that their time spent together on the bench did ill for Blackmun’s friendship with Burger, whom he came to regard as a poor administrator and shallow thinker; the animosity grew in the matter of United States v. Nixon, which bitterly divided the Court. So, too, would other issues—among them, toward the end of his career, the death penalty—and by Greenhouse’s account Blackmun conducted himself well throughout them.
Detailed and well considered: a welcome study of Blackmun’s contributions to the law.Pub Date: May 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7791-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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