Most timely, and of wide interest to civil libertarians and students of legal history.
It’s one thing to cry “fire” in a crowded theater. It’s another to cry “surrender” in the face of an enemy, as this broadly ranging survey of historical laws attests.
There are many good reasons for suppressing certain speech in wartime, writes Stone (Law/Univ. of Chicago): for instance, “a dissenter may disclose information that is useful to the enemy, such as invasion plans or the vulnerabilities of the navy”; “antiwar dissent may strengthen the enemy’s resolve and make it more difficult for the nation to achieve victory or negotiate a just peace”; or, provocatively, “dissent may persuade people to vote for political candidates who promise to end the war.” Yet laws regulating the expression of such sentiments in wartime—which takes up about 20 percent of our nation’s history, he reckons—tend to be made by Congress in a mood of war fever, with predictable results: “The fear, anger, and fervent patriotism engendered during a war naturally undermine the capacity of individuals and institutions to make clearheaded judgments about risk, fairness, and danger.” Thus, he notes, the so-called Patriot Act, which “smuggled into law several investigative practices that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but that law enforcement officials had for years tried unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to authorize.” Alas, Stone shows, Congress is all too easily persuaded to abandon American principles for political expediency: “Most often, Congress has responded to public fears in wartime with draconian and even savage legislation.” Thus the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the promulgation of the Sedition Act after the Revolution, the rise of the HUAC during the Cold War, and the deployment of various secret-police agencies during the Vietnam era. In this long, literate study, Stone addresses six major episodes that have gnawed away at the First Amendment, closing with an examination of our fear-ridden age and its erosive propensities.
Most timely, and of wide interest to civil libertarians and students of legal history.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05880-8
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
