A strangely intolerant brief filed in support of individual freedom. Longtime Washington Post and Village Voice columnist Hentoff (Speaking Freely, 1997, etc.) illustrates the Bill of Rights through stories about individuals whose lives exemplify them. Not surprisingly for an author more concerned with protecting citizens from government rather than in collective action through government, these stories revolve around court cases, and Supreme Court justices Douglas and Brennan play prominent roles. Less familiar and more interesting is the extended discussion of Kenneth Clark, whose work was footnoted in Brown v. Board of Education and who subsequently devoted his life to converting the intent of that decision into reality. Eschewing separatist appeals to black power and affirmative action, Clark remained a committed integrationist supporting equality in education as the key to social justice. With this exception, however, the stories of those not sitting on the bench share a basic plot: Individuals acting in an unpopular but completely legal manner come into conflict with an authority, they are pressured by those who believe more strongly in conformity to social norms than individual freedom, but they refuse to compromise their constitutional rights. The result of this formulaic discussion is both to supply some wonderful examples of principled fortitude and to reveal Hentoff’s odd intolerance of all potentially legitimate claims competing with the Bill of Rights. This means, for example, that an employee refusing to attend a seminar on sexual harassment is a hero, and campaign finance reform is unacceptable given the Court’s classification of campaign contributions as a form of free speech; apparently to be “an Authentic American” you have to believe that individual freedom trumps all other values. Hentoff should be praised for promoting the Bill of Rights, but should be reminded that there is more to the Constitution and to social life.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-019010-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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