Solid work. Those worried that the U.S. has become a rogue nation won’t sleep any easier after reading this book.
Where were you when Pinochet was arrested and charged with genocide?
If you are a part of the “select world of international law,” writes London-based attorney Sands, then “October 16, 1998, is the closest you will get to a JFK or a John Lennon moment.” The ailing Chilean dictator had traveled to London in the belief that he enjoyed diplomatic immunity, but the Spanish judge who ordered his arrest—thereby involving three sovereign nations—begged to differ. To trust Sands’s account, Pinochet’s arrest made dictators around the world sweat, to say nothing of enablers such as Henry Kissinger, who protested the British government’s action. “What Kissinger really objects to—although he cannot bring himself to say it in so many words—is the loss of sovereign and executive power, and its subjection to the limits of law by an independent judiciary,” Sands writes. So it is with the Bush administration, staffed by people such as John Bolton, who has declared that international treaties “are not legally binding,” and Richard Haass, who advocated an “à la carte multilateralism” by which the U.S. could pick and choose which laws to obey. Ironically, Sands shows, much international law is fully within the spirit of the United Nations as envisioned by Roosevelt and Churchill, who seemed unworried about yielding power to international bodies; but Kissinger’s fear has become an article of American faith, a blanket refusal to allow international courts to have jurisdiction over American citizens. Congress even passed a law allowing the president “to use all means necessary and appropriate” to free any American detained or imprisoned by the International Criminal Court, which presumably includes invading the Hague. Such lawlessness as the invasion of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib affair and the authorization of torture by subcontractors, Sands suggests, is therefore likely to go unpunished.
Solid work. Those worried that the U.S. has become a rogue nation won’t sleep any easier after reading this book.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03452-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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