Two powerhouse law historians/journalists deliver a major contribution to the history of the Supreme Court.
Two scholars, each distinguished in his or her respective fields, challenge received orthodoxies about the Burger Supreme Court while detailing how earlier breakthroughs in civil rights and criminal law were reversed or hollowed out.
Graetz (Columbia Law School; The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America's Environment, Security and Independence, 2011, etc.) and Pulitzer Prize–winning former New York Times Supreme Court journalist Greenhouse (Yale Law School; The Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction, 2012, etc.) break new ground in this study of the Supreme Court. What Chief Justice Warren Burger's (1907-1995) court actually did has been minimized over the years since he retired, and his years of service have been characterized as ones in which “nothing much happened.” On the contrary, in this groundbreaking study, the authors establish beyond a doubt that Burger's court gutted the most significant rulings of the previous court. Graetz and Greenhouse proceed by subject area, following the court across the years, as the cumulative body of its decisions reversed many of the major accomplishments of its predecessors. The rights of criminal suspects or defendants were undermined. School integration was transformed into economic segregation, resulting in the reconstruction of barriers between races by restricting funding to each separate district. By insisting that prior intent to discriminate be proven before its effects could be considered, the court also undermined certain civil rights achievements. Free speech protections were transformed by the court's perverse use of the power to expand rights of business speech (advertising) and earlier nonexistent freedoms of corporations. Like all human agencies, the court was fallible, misjudging both the contemporary importance of some cases and the future effects of others. Nonetheless, the authors relentlessly demonstrate, it accomplished the reversals it set out to achieve.
Two powerhouse law historians/journalists deliver a major contribution to the history of the Supreme Court.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3250-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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