A cogent, organized history of the beginnings of free speech in the United States.
Accessible study of America’s fierce devotion to freedom of speech through the vociferous public reactions to Britain’s perceived tyranny.
First Amendment scholar Solomon (Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York Univ.; Ellery's Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer, 2007, etc.) spotlights how Colonial citizens and patriots—e.g., minister John Wise, irrepressible newspapers editors, silversmith Paul Revere, farmer John Dickinson, and others—challenged the seditious libel law that the American Colonies had inherited from England. The inherited law prohibited political dissent that would sow discord or slander “between the King and his people” and was aimed at keeping the relationship between sovereign and subject intact. However, as Solomon reveals in orderly chapters, the colonists would not stand by quietly when taxed without self-representation, as first articulated by outspoken Puritan minister Wise in 1687 when he criticized Massachusetts Gov. Edmund Andros for imposing unfair tax policy. Normally, the fines and physical punishment would have been severe. However, with time, the citizen-held juries would not uphold the seditious libel law in court, much to the consternation of chief justice of Massachusetts and governor Thomas Hutchinson when trying to silence the radical Boston Gazette publishers, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, from criticizing him in an important case in 1767. Solomon looks at the rise of newspapers, “coffeehouse culture,” broadsides, political theater, cartoons, and even symbols such as effigies and the Liberty Tree in Boston as significant in whipping up public foment. They were all part of the Enlightenment convictions held by the framers that citizens of a democracy “required the freedom to speak freely and passionately on all the issues before them.” While the early American revolutionaries revered their freedom of expression as part of their patriotic duty, the subsequent legal challenges severely undermined those early libertarian impulses. Solomon follows the First Amendment arguments to the present.
A cogent, organized history of the beginnings of free speech in the United States.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-230-34206-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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