Significant legal history with lessons for all citizens.
A sharp history that shows the precarious nature of American citizenship.
As law professor Frost demonstrates in this crisp, concise book, the revocation of citizenship from native-born or naturalized individuals often stems from the desire to deprive individuals and/or groups of their political and civil rights, with an eye toward deportation. The overarching intention is to shape society to the prevailing ideological moment, to ensure that anti-establishment forces don’t “taint” the nation’s “purity” or challenge the hegemony of White leadership. Frost uses the stories of individual actors, from Emma Goldman to Robert E. Lee to Dred and Harriet Scott, to fill out the bigger picture of the government’s assault upon—or at least selective reading of—the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It’s a sorry tale that Frost narrates engagingly, digging into the ever shifting racial boundaries of citizenship as well as the unconstitutional deployment of denaturalization initiatives. Frost explores how a wide range of factors, including race, ethnicity, and religious and political preferences, have sparked the state to intervene to maintain the status quo. “Denaturalization is most often associated with totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union,” writes the author. “But by the end of the twentieth century, the US government had denaturalized at least twenty-two thousand people—more than any other democracy before or since. The effect of the denaturalization campaign was to silence those who might otherwise have taken on leadership positions in politics, journalism, and the labor movement. By publicly targeting [certain] men and women…the government hoped to intimidate into silence tens of thousands of foreign-born citizens who were similarly vulnerable.” In the 21st century, the citizenship debate continues to be heated and controversial—but still revolves around the state’s power to deny the rights of “undesirables.” The takeaway is that citizenship is conditional, a fact that is hardly news for Dreamers across the U.S.
Significant legal history with lessons for all citizens.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5142-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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