With the Constitution under daily threat, Lepore’s outstanding book makes for urgent reading.
The noted historian advances the cause of an aggressively, and progressively, malleable set of rules for government.
“The U.S. Constitution was intended to be amended,” writes Lepore at the outset. Whereas the functions of government were established in such a way that there would be continuity from generation to generation, and whereas the Constitution sets fairly high hurdles for change, nonetheless, by Lepore’s lights, the Founders intended for the document to be changed in order to meet the needs of the day, trusting in the Enlightenment premise that “the human mind is driven by reason.” Article V, Lepore continues, is “a sleeping giant”: In it the Founders specified that change could come in one of two ways, the first being a congressional proposal, the second a convention of the states, with a “double supermajority” of votes for approval, two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. Although there have been flurries of amendments—including the first 10, yielding the Bill of Rights—it has been nearly 40 years since the last constitutional convention was held, even as, Lepore calculates, members of Congress proposed 2,100 amendments between 1980 and 2000. Part of the problem is congressional gridlock, a feature of government since the days of President Reagan; another is what Lepore considers the false doctrine of originalism—which, she writes provocatively, “arose from the failure of conservatives to change the Constitution by democratic means.” Lepore presses her argument with numerous case studies, including the difficult passage of an amendment to allow direct election of senators (formerly appointed by governors), the argument over an income tax (and one that progressively taxed the rich more than the poor), the failed adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment, and a longtime favorite that has yet to come about: the abolition of the aristocratically inspired Electoral College.
With the Constitution under daily threat, Lepore’s outstanding book makes for urgent reading.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781631496080
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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