A cogent analysis that builds a common-sense case for proceeding with caution and against using impeachment as a partisan...
Amid the partisan passion, an illuminating primer of analysis and context lowers the temperature on this hot-button issue.
By the end of this volume, readers may still disagree on whether the current president should be impeached, but the debate will be better informed by an understanding of precedent and Constitutional conditions. “Like any potent tool, impeachment is dangerous if misused,” writes Hirsch (Chair, Justice and Law Studies/Williams Coll.; The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!: The Incredible True Story of the Art Heist that Shocked a Nation, 2016, etc.), who proceeds to explore both its dangers and misuse. He strongly suggests that it was misused in the case of the two actual impeachments, those of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, both of whom faced charges brought by the House that were largely partisan in nature and fell short of the “bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitution stipulates. The author also distinguishes between the largely political charges levied against Johnson and the moral and legal transgressions Clinton faced as an accused perjurer and obstructer of justice. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, met the impeachment criteria as delineated here, though he resigned rather than face it. Yet Nixon’s threatened impeachment had the opposite impact as Johnson’s actual one, as if impeachment “had been normalized by Watergate. Whereas the Andrew Johnson fiasco led to avoidance of impeachment for the next century, the successful pursuit of Richard Nixon produced the reverse effect.” Not only has Donald Trump been threatened by campaigns to impeach, but so has every president since Clinton, as “payback begets payback begets payback.” Hirsch concludes that collusion with Russia could well be an impeachable offense, but that it should only proceed with bipartisan backing and broad popular support.
A cogent analysis that builds a common-sense case for proceeding with caution and against using impeachment as a partisan weapon.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87286-762-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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