An enjoyable historical presentation with a frustratingly judicious conclusion. From the chief justice of the US Supreme Court you anticipate authoritative, decisive, even momentous opinions. In this volume, however, Rehnquist conducts a walk through the park rather than a grilling before the bar. To consider the status of civil liberties during national emergencies he explores the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War and its aftermath, the suppression of civil liberties under the Espionage Act during WWI, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. The historical presentation is descriptive and conventional, yet pleasant, as Rehnquist focuses on legal actions attendant to the temporary restrictions of individual rights. There is much more information on the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination than necessary, and a more detailed examination of the relevant cases, informed by analysis along the way, might have better served his ends. Nevertheless, the exposition is well crafted and by late in the volume the reader is ready for the payoff: Rehnquist’s conclusions regarding the clash of individual rights and national security. Unfortunately, the brief concluding chapter is more illustrative of how a cautious jurist approaches an inherently problematic question than of any principle that might provide an answer. The issue is clearly identified——achieving a proper balance between freedom and order”—without defining “proper” beyond suggesting that the balance shifts “to some degree” toward order when national well-being is at stake. Rehnquist does eschew an absolute standing for civil liberties, if the circumstances absolutely require their suspension, and he apparently prefers to avoid suggesting general criteria that would inject content into this abstract stand. One imagines that if Rehnquist were asked how he likes his steak, he would reply with an insightful history of man’s experience as a carnivore along with an injunction that meat must be cooked but not overdone. The chief justice raises an important question without resolving anything. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44661-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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