The lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade presents a compelling memoir of her handling of that seminal 1973 Supreme Court case—into which she artlessly weaves her own biography; a history of the abortion- rights struggle; and an idealistic call to combat political and judicial forces that seek to narrow or overturn Roe. Roe v. Wade has been condemned as a raw exercise in judicial policy-making, and as lacking an explicit basis in the Constitution, but for Weddington it represents the fulfillment of a fundamental constitutional right. The case's genesis was astonishingly humble and personal: Weddington became passionately committed to the struggle for abortion rights as a young woman who had to go to Mexico for an abortion in order to elude rigid anti- abortion laws in Texas. The litigation began as an explicit act of social engineering. Bringing a class action as a young lawyer who had never argued a contested case, Weddington began at the district-court level by arguing in part that the reasoning in the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut—which found a constitutional right to privacy in striking down a Connecticut law banning contraceptives—should apply to invalidate the restrictive abortion law in Texas. Weddington gives the reader enough legal analysis to understand the reasoning behind Roe, but her primary focus isn't on the arcana of constitutional law, but on what she views as the elemental nature of abortion rights and the meaning of such rights for American women. She recounts her own prominent post-Roe role in Democratic party politics, and discusses subsequent Supreme Court abortion-rights cases. Her account culminates in professions of concern for the future of abortion rights and in a ``Plan for Action,'' in which she makes specific suggestions for political activism. Weddington preaches to the converted, and inadequately addresses legal objections to Roe, but she gives valuable, passionate insights into the significance of that historic case.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-399-13790-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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