5 comments about Ten Minutes from Normal.

1. I highly recommend this book.
   The negative reviews here are obviously from those
   who have a different political position than the author.
   
   How sad some can't look past partisan politics to enjoy
   a book. FYI: There are talented people in BOTH parties
   & I find it inspiring to read about those who choose
   to use their considerable talents in service to their
   country and what they believe is best for it.



2. I really enjoyed this book. It gives a good insight into a busy life of a politician..
   
   BEAWERE, Karen Hughes is a friend and a supporter of President Bush, so if you lack respect for the president you won't rate this book very high!



3. I really enjoyed reading this book! It is like having an inside look into the life of our president and some of the people who work closely with him. It is easy reading and very interesting. It is also very inspiring.
   
   Happy Reading!!!



4. This is a very well written and absorbing insight into the lives and goings-on of our government. I could hardly put it down.



5. No one should let this book escape perusal, especially at this reasonable price! You've heard that Karl Rove is "Bush's brain?" Well, Ms. Hughes is "Bush's brain on drugs (with a side of bacon)!"
   
   To read her describe Dubya's mind as "laser-like" leaves no doubt in my own mind that when she worked for Reagan, she was a conduit for Dubya on the "Star Wars - Strategic Defense Initiative" project. I don't remember if that was his pre-cocaine or post-cocaine years, but it all makes so much sense now.
   
   I'm happy that after a lifetime of one political success after another, she took time off from her busy schedule for a sabbatical to bake brownies for her young, hungry son. I wonder if perchance, she has a recipe for a cake with a file in it?
   
   Now that she's back on the team with her traveling road-show thumping America's generosity and love for the rest of the world, I suppose her son will go hungry, but at least America will be safe from those naughty terrorists! Praise da lard!

2 comments about Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer's Memoir.

1. Fifteen years ago, I found myself in one of many long talks with Frank Donner. Nation readers will remember Donner's great books on U.S. political repression, The Age of Surveillance and Protectors of Privilege. On this occasion, however, our conversation turned to Frank's work as an attorney thirty years before, when he had defended dozens of people in McCarthy-era subversion cases. Donner had the animated face of a Jewish Benjamin Franklin. His voice always sounded a half-tone sharp of the prevailing conversational pitch, and he was imbued with a combative, cheerfully anti-authoritarian spirit. But as the nitty-gritty of his work in the fifties emerged from the recesses of memory, Frank's voice lowered to a hoarse mutter, the flesh of his face grew heavy and he lapsed into gloomy rumination: about clients overcome by paranoia; about the burden of learning that a Communist Party committee in Ohio had beaten a member falsely accused of informing; about the F.B.I.'s harassment of Frank's own family and neighbors. These were hardly conventional courtroom war stories.
   
   Most of the attorneys who shouldered the unprecedented professional burden imposed by the anti-Communist purge are now dead, Donner among them. Few now remember that they were a diverse lot--labor lawyers and Communist Party members, white-shoe corporate practitioners, distinguished academics--or that for most of them the loyalty cases turned out to be a messy, life-defining business. Even institutional memory is at risk of being lost: Early this year, the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, established to aid these lawyers when the A.C.L.U. succumbed to the era's hysteria, passed out of independent existence, merging with the larger Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.
   
   Two books published over the past two years--a family biography centered on liberal California celebrity lawyer Bartley Crum by his daughter Patricia Bosworth, and the memoir of left-wing paladin Victor Rabinowitz--begin the important excavation of these lawyers' stories. Reviewers have focused on each book's larger story: Bosworth's is a sometimes excruciating chronicle of an imploding upper-class family, Rabinowitz's is a saga of a half-century of activist lawyering. But loyalty cases are the linchpins upon which both men's lives and careers turned.
   
   Many people remember Joseph Welch's "have you no decency" denunciation of Joe McCarthy. But Rabinowitz tells a story that's probably more representative of loyalty-case lawyering. The occasion was one of McCarthy's hearings at the Army Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, around 1953. A distraught woman approached Rabinowitz outside the hearing room. A single mother and, it seems, a party member, Sylvia worked as a clerk for the local board of education but had been formerly employed at the Signal Corps. If compelled to testify, she would lose her public school desk job. Rabinowitz took Sylvia's case on the spot.
   
   I waited in the hall to catch McCarthy as
   
   he came up in the elevator, and a few
   
   minutes before ten o'clock he stepped out
   
   of an elevator car, saw me ... threw his
   
   arms around me shouting, "Hello Vic!
   
   What can I do for you?" There were
   
   about fifty people in the hall, and I did
   
   not relish the greeting.
   
   Keeping a lid on his repulsion, Rabinowitz asked McCarthy to excuse Sylvia from testifying. "I pointed out that it seemed unnecessarily cruel to this young woman to deprive her of employment." Sure, said McCarthy--just check with his chief counsel, Roy Cohn. Cohn, true to form, said no. The genial McCarthy proceeded to shred Sylvia in the hearing; she lost her job the next day.
   
   By disposition and training, lawyers are essentially believers in the system. The attorneys at the top of their game in the fifties, even Marxists like Rabinowitz, had earlier found special ratification for that inclination in the New Deal. So cases like Sylvia's represented a rude awakening. And the unique pressures of ended loyalty cases--the fractious fights between C.P.ers and liberals, the constant F.B.I. surveillance, the likelihood that attorneys themselves would be subpoenaed by the same investigating committees as their clients--could leave even high-powered lawyers feeling unmoored. Some, like Rabinowitz, were so outraged by the sustained cynicism of the inquisitors that they became outriders of sixties radicalism. On the other hand, at least a few were left crushed in livelihood and spirit--among them Bartley Crum, one of the most prominent members of the Hollywood Ten's "dream team" in 1947, who would spend the next decade yanked back and forth between the poles of principled resistance and humiliating capitulation.
   
   Both Rabinowitz and Crum arrived at their encounters with the inquisition through the National Lawyers Guild, founded in 193 7 as a progressive, pro-labor alternative to the American Bar Association. Except for the guild, though, their careers could not have been more different. Rabinowitz is, at 87, one of the few survivors of that era still practicing law. Moved by a short story by Albert Maltz (later one of the Hollywood Ten), Rabinowitz had steered himself into labor law, joining the Communist Party in 1942. In a few years, he and Leonard Boudin founded what remains the nation's leading progressive law firm, today known as Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman.
   
   Unrepentant Leftist is an unapologetic recollection of movements and clients. Rabinowitz is blunt in his motivation for joining the party (he was "more interested in works than faith"), equally unambiguous about his differences with party policy in the postwar years and his reasons for leaving in 1960. He recounts his firm's long representation of Cuba, the ups and downs of the guild, his efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement in the South (among his clients, his daughter Joni, tried in Georgia on a trumped-up perjury charge). With great dignity he describes the arduous job of aiding in the representation of his partner Boudin's daughter Kathy, who, after eleven years as a Weather Underground fugitive, was arrested in 1981 for murder in a Brink's robbery in Nyack, New York. Through all of this Rabinowitz comes across as a stand-up guy, as Abbie Hoffman defined it: the Tony Curtis character who, when the Roman centurion comes for Kirk Douglas, rises to declare, "I am Spartacus."
   
   Rabinowitz was witness to the first chapter of the purge. In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Labor Act to regulate union organizing. Taft-Hartley's section 9(h) required officers of unions certified by the National Labor Relations Board to make sworn declarations that they were not members of the Communist Party. A Rabinowitz client, the American Communications Association, was closely aligned with the C.P. and, when its officers could not sign the requisite oath, was duly decertified. Various federal judges upheld the decertification. Rabinowitz tried to convince the union and party leadership to swallow their loss: He feared an adverse Supreme Court ruling would set a broader and more dangerous precedent. The party hierarchy insisted on an appeal, but Rabinowitz turned out to be right. In American Communications Association v. Douds, the Court ruled that protecting "the free flow of commerce" from crippling strikes favored by C.P. strategists trumped First Amendment rights. It was the first national test of a blanket ban on Communists in trade unions, and it unleashed a flood of anti-subversive legislation aimed at other sectors.
   
   At first, the anti-Communist panic was actually good for the firm's business. But soon the professional cost was clear. Many individual clients could not afford to pay, and heavily Communist unions like the United Electrical Workers were going broke defending themselves. The firm's largest and most reliable client, the Health Care and Hospital Workers Union-District 65, abruptly decided it needed lawyers without Rabinowitz-Boudin's red taint. Rabinowitz himself was called to testify before Senator James Eastland's Internal Security Subcommittee, and had to block Eastland's investigators physically from seizing his client files.
   
   With exceptional candor, Rabinowitz illuminates, in new and often unflattering ways, the role played by the Communist Party hierarchy--the flight underground of C.P. leaders indicted under the Smith Act, for instance, which he correctly viewed as the sheerest folly. Equally enlightening are his accounts of debates with other party lawyers on how to handle investigators' subpoenas--arguments between "First Amendment Communists" wanting to defy the committees' right to ask any questions at all, and Fifth Amendment Communists wanting to protect themselves with the established right to non-incrimination. In the short run the so-called First Amendment Communists lost out, especially after citations of the Hollywood Ten for contempt; most witnesses claimed the Fifth. But in the long run, repeated invocations of the Fifth Amendment under the glare of klieg lights helped convince the public that dissenters really were conspiratorial criminals. It would take more than a decade before Rabinowitz, Donner and other lawyers could chip away substantially at the inquisition's reach, one contempt citation, one passport denial at a time.
   
   Communist Party strategists come in for a lot of knocks in Bart Crum's biography, too, though from a different perspective. Where Rabinowitz complains that the party sometimes insisted on hiring establishment lawyers like Crum at the expense of political practitioners' greater expertise, Crum, working on the Hollywood Ten case for producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, was in precisely the opposite position: locked out of key meetings and decisions.
   
   Crum desperately wanted to be a standup guy, but through a combination of personal failings and the ravages of blackmail, he ended up with a chronic case of liberal staggers. Prior to 1947 he'd combined a lucrative career as retainer to the likes of William Randolph Hearst with forays into reform politics. Self-aggrandizing, fiscally profligate and publicity-addicted, he attached himself temporarily to lost causes: the doomed 1940 presidential campaign of reform Republican Wendell Willkie; the pioneering but equally doomed newspaper PM, which he tried, disastrously, to salvage from bankruptcy. Another lost cause was his family. Patricia Bosworth's book filters her father's public career through an intimate life of considerable privilege but greater pain. I'll skip over Bosworth's recounting of the details, except to say that her father's appealing public persona, his idealism and restless energy, are as apparent as his horrifying self-indulgence.
   
   By 1947, Crum's attachment to Popular Front causes--ranging from Jewish resettlement in Palestine to the Progressive Citizens Association--had attracted the scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover. Then came the Hollywood Ten. From the beginning, Crum found himself at odds with orthodox party lawyers on the team. "My father felt uncomfortable with the Party's secrecy," Bosworth writes. "He would joke and flatter to make a point, tactics the Communists didn't appreciate at all... In the midst of one discussion my father suggested everybody simply tell the truth." His clients Scott and Dmytryk agreed, but were outvoted when party lawyer Ben Margolis and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo argued that to answer questions at all would acknowledge HUAC's right to ask. Worse, Crum learned that party lawyers had held a separate, secret caucus about tactics. Despite Crum's professional prominence, he was ill equipped for the blacklist's political complexity. "You have no cunning in your face, Bartley Crum," Bertolt Brecht said to him one day, shortly before the martyrdom-averse Brecht told a boldfaced lie to HUAC about his political affiliations and then packed his bags for East Germany.
   
   Still, Crum took on other loyalty cases--California teachers and unionists mostly, meeting them late at night in bars to avoid attracting attention. Rather than directly challenge the inquisition, his strategy was to "protect the client from making rash statements ... to sound 'hostile' to Communism." It's not clear whether this "establishment" strategy paid off for his clients. It certainly did not protect Crum from the F.B.I.: "Most certainly a Communist or a hidden Communist," his file says. "Always refers to himself as a Catholic or Republican; obviously a double alibi." Nor did it shield his family from being ostracized in their affluent, conservative social set.
   
   Crum couldn't quite make up his mind where his commitments lay. Sometime in 1948, he stopped handling loyalty cases because "his more conservative clients disapproved." Yet that same year he moved to New York as new publisher of the failing PM, which he renamed the New York Star. Endlessly red-baited and hopelessly undercapitalized, the paper was out of business in a year, and a few weeks later Crum attempted suicide. By the end of 1950, Crum had resigned from the National Lawyers Guild to look "less subversive." At the same time his client Dmytryk broke with the Hollywood Ten to testify about his own activities. Most of the Ten blamed Bart.
   
   These conflicting pressures reached critical mass in the spring of 1953: In a restaurant with his family, he was suddenly called to the phone. Hoover was on the line, warning Crum his passport would be revoked unless he went to Washington to answer some questions. Crum provided a dirt-eating written statement: "I am a practicing Catholic. My religious and political views are not and have never been compatible with Communism or Socialism." That's what he told his family, gradually adopting a defensive bitterness toward the C.P. What Crum didn't say is that he also agreed to provide the F.B.I. with information about the Lawyers Guild and two of his colleagues.
   
   In the short run, Crum's strategy worked: His passport was renewed. But the process seemed to collapse his internal system of meaning; he had no Rabinowitz-like compass to restore stability to his life. He'd already come to rely on alcohol and barbiturates. His son Bart Jr. committed suicide. Over the next few years "his career fell into a shambles," notes Bosworth. Crum only re-emerged in the public eye in a bizarre episode in 1958, representing one of the founders of the notorious promoter of the entertainment blacklist, Aware, Inc., in a complicated lawsuit against Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. This brought him into contact with the young Robert F. Kennedy's Senate rackets investigation. Hoping that Kennedy might somehow straighten him out with the F.B.I., Crum began to leak information he'd been told privately by Teamsters lawyers; he finally agreed to testify publicly. In a Capitol Hill hearing room he even charged that Washington power broker Edward Bennett Williams, on the Hoffa team, offered to buy his silence. The charge was probably true, but Crum was so addled by drugs and alcohol that he got key facts wrong and was forced to retract his own statement. And there, essentially, Crum's life ends: Within a year he committed suicide after a dinner party.
   
   The interesting thing about these two very different stories is that Crum brought to the inquisition so many seeming advantages over Rabinowitz: money, political connections, press contacts. Yet it was Crum who ended up shattered. It's easy enough to pin their different trajectories on character and temperament. But there's more to it than that. There were liberals with lives more orderly than Crum's who managed to be just as politically unsteady, including the era's A.C.L.U. director, Morris Ernst, who secretly passed information to Hoover. Maybe the difference is that a party attorney like Rabinowitz had little to lose, while a wealthy establishment lawyer could lose everything. Moreover, Crum and Ernst both believed their professional effectiveness depended on remaining respectable, on preserving access to the powerful--a thoroughly ineffectual self-deception and a lesson for today's access-preserving Washington liberals. (The self-deceptions were not all on one side. The standup silence of Rabinowitz and other party loyalists, while admirable in so many ways, was also part of a disastrous culture of secrecy that made anti-Communist attacks as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.)
   
   Between them, these two biographies evoke the minute particulars of a defining moment in the history of U.S. civil liberties. It's easy to forget that most of the earliest important First Amendment precedents, in the shadow of World War 1, were more recent to McCarthy-era lawyers than the Hollywood Ten are to us today; the expansive First Amendment rulings of the Warren Court were still years away. And then there was the unprecedented challenge to lawyering itself. Going back to Samuel Adams and the Boston Massacre, the American legal system has generally maintained a clear distinction between advocate and client, but the loyalty cases punished lawyers and clients alike. While not every lawyer met the loyalty-case test with equal honor, virtually all did so at personal cost.
   
   The loyalty cases, which once loomed large enough to make national political careers for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, now surface in the national consciousness only occasionally, like a bad dream fleetingly recollected over lunch. But theories of the First Amendment that today seem common sense were first articulated by loyalty-ease lawyers; for instance, Yale Law School Professor Thomas Emerson, who with I.F. Stone founded the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, conceived his magisterial The System of Freedom of Expression as an affirmative response to the witch hunts. If jurors today know enough about the First Amendment to acquit Oprah Winfrey of libeling the Texas beef industry, if opinion polls show a public suspicious of a messianic inquisitor like Kenneth Starr, it's largely because a contemporary language for free speech was created by the exhausted and embattled civil liberties bar of the fifties.



2. Any student of human rights and the US history of legal battles in this field would enjoy this memoir. Mr. Rabinowitz along with his late partner Leonard Boudin blazed new trails in the legal annals in labor, international, and civil rights law. This is a brief account of the life of Mr. Rabinowitz, his cases, his views and friends and enemies he met along the way. A wonderful read.

No comments about Manhattan North Homicide: Detective First Grade Thomas McKenna Nypd.

No comments about Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw.

5 comments about Hugo Black: A Biography.

1. I had a great Constitutional law professor while I was in law school. He had all these stories of the Supreme Court behind the scenes, and it brought the law to life. So I started to look around for Supreme Court biographies. About 6 years later, I'm still reading them. This is the best I have come across. Love him or hate him, Hugo Black is one of the 10 most important Justices in history, most would agree. More than that--he had a strong, controversial, well-thought-out point of view about the law, though he was friends with many people who absolutely disagreed with him. He is interesting to conservatives and liberals alike and he challenges us to use our brains because he doesn't fit neatly into modern ideas of what it is to be Republican or Democrat. For instance, he's known as a "judicial activist," but he was a textualist (like Scalia). He's also something of an original intent guy (though he doesn't ignore the Amendments like the 14th Amendment that were passed long after the "founding fathers" died). He didn't believe in what's called "substantive due process"---the notion of fairness that many jurists find in the Constitution's due process clause(s). In other words---abortion, gay rights, right to die, anything labeled as a privacy right---he had his views on what the law SHOULD be but...well, as Hugo said (paraphrasing): "I like my privacy as much as the next man, but I don't find it in the Constitution." Also, he wrote Korematsu, the opinion that allowed the government to put Japanese-Americans into internment camps during the war years. Along with Justice Douglas, he was the most vigorous protector of the First Amendment free speech rights that the Court has ever had. He was banned for years from Alabama because of his assistance in desegregaing the nation and providing equal protection to African Americans (which is interesting in light of his KKK past). Thus, if you're a fan of the liberal Warren Court era OR a fan of Scalia and Thomas's modern/throwback textualist and originalist ideas, there is much for you to learn. That aside, Hugo's story was fascinating. Other reviewers have remarked on his KKK and New Deal Senator past. He was also one of the longest sitting Justices---30 years or so. This book is an easy read and you'll get a feel for Hugo's PERSONALITY, not just his actions. (I think of him as "Hugo" rather than Justice Black because I think of him as a friend...and that's due to this book).



2. What more can you say to attract a reader than this book is the story of a southern lawyer who begins as a member of the Ku Klax Klan in Alabama and ends his career as one of the most respected members of the United States Supreme Court. WOW! The truth IS stranger than fiction.

   This book was written by one of Justice Black's former law clerks on the Court. It is well-written and gives great insight into the man, his methods, convictions, passions, and flaws.

   Highly recommended for those who are fans of the Court's jurisprudence during the era of expanding protection of individual rights.




3. Justice Black was (and is) a fascinating study in American constitutional theory -- an unabashed and lifelong Democrat, Black surprised many, especially toward the end of his life, when he often refused to join in the Warren court's adventures into judicial activism. Newman's biography is comprehensive, touching on all the key points of Black's life both on and off the bench, including a lenghty examination of his now-famous First Amendment jurisprudence. Black emerges in three dimensions, as a complicated and passionate advocate and jurist. Three minor flaws: first, Newman, obviously in awe of Black, occasionally misses an opportunity to fairly criticize some of his opinions; secondly, the book does not always flow smoothly, but often advances in a rough, staccato fashion (a venial flaw, considering the complicated subject matter). Finally, toward the end of the book, Newman becomes somewhat overly-sentimental - hardly a page goes by without Newman describing the "tears pouring down Black's face" as he recalls his youth and public service. Again, given the author's clear love of his subject, this is forgiveable.

   Overall, a fantastic book - a must read for any Supreme Court scholar.




4. This is a towering work on the life of Justice Black, who, more than any other man, shaped our concept of what civil liberties were in the late 20th century.

   While author Roger K. Newman clearly worships Justice Black, he isn't blind to the almost inexplicable inconsistencies in Black's thinking: how, for example, the civil libertarian who fought to extend the prohibitions of the Bill of Rights to state action could dismiss the importance of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure! Newman's account of Black's voyage from lifetime membership in the Ku Klux Klan to champion of equal rights is a much more clear-eyed look at the inherent contradictions thereof than Black's own fumbling efforts to explain his paradigm shift.

   The author strikes a delicate balance between the intricacies of legal reasoning (of probable interest only to law students like myself) and simple storytelling which will fascinate the uninitiated. He tells you enough, but not too much!

   This book amply fulfills the primary purpose of all recent histories--it gives the reader a much clearer understanding of how we got where we are today from where we were at the turn of the last century.




5. From his time as a United States Senator to his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1971 Hugo Black was never boring. His career was marked by a willingness to defend those who needed a defense. As a successful attorney in Birmingham Black refused to represent large corporations, only individuals who desperately needed his help. As a Senator Black argued for legislation to help the same group of people. And as a Supreme Court Justice Black became known as the leading libertartian of his time. Roger Newman captures Black brilliantly, both as a man and as a public figure. Newman looks at Black dispassionately during good times and bad. From his time in the KKK thru his tenure on the court, Newman's analysis is honest and insightful. If you are interested in the Supreme Court or American history this book is a must read.

1 comments about Lawyer's Lawyer: The Life of John W. Davis.

1. This is a Superb biography/autobiography of Clarksburg West Virginia native John W. Davis,a brilliant lawyer and politician who was the only West Virginian presidential Candidate who came close to the presidency losing to Calvin Coolege back in 1924.This is a very enjoyable must read book on the life and times of John W. Davis!

No comments about Drowning in the Desert: A JAG's Search for Justice in Iraq.

5 comments about Vietnam Stories: A Judge's Memoir.

1. I served in the Army JAGC during the time Lt. Col. Crouchet was a Military Judge and tried cases over which he presided. Col. Crouchet's recollections fit his view of the war and its participants. Not to say the events recounted didn't occur, only that they have been described as Col. Crouchet saw them. Others might place different emphasis on many of those events, and many would, I think, include telling events he omitted.



2. Senseless violence, inexplicable rages, and bad judgment make up the very personal hell described in this memoir. These are...deeply personal accounts of the soldiers...as told by an author with 26 years of experience in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps.



3. I particularly liked the idea of including Kathy in several chapters to explain that Viet Nam was not a place for men only.



4. The book covers areas that were widely discussed in the media at the time that they occurred. The Long Binh riots, murder & rape at the Americal division, the commanding officer who demanded a body count and a discussion of project 100K, which allowed soldiers to enter the military service who were not otherwise qualified. Also included are scenes from Saigon where high ranking civilians and military lived a life of luxury.



5. The book covers areas that were widely discussed in the media at the time that they occurred. The Long Binh riots, murder & rape at the Americal division, the commanding officer who demanded a body count and a discussion of project 100K, which allowed soldiers to enter the military service who were not otherwise qualified. Also included are scenes from Saigon where high ranking civilians and military lived a life of luxury.

5 comments about Silent Justice: The Clarence Thomas Story.

1. John Greenya sets out to write a biography of Justice Thomas without making a judgement one way or the other. He pretty much manages to do that, however the story seems to lack any emotion at all.

   This is an almost impossible task as the early life of Justice Thomas is alive with passion. The hearings against him alive with the same and the voice of his detractors and his defenders alike brim with this emotion.

   Greenya doesn't seem to want to make a decision. He lets the participants and the record do most of the talking. His final chapter allows people involved and uninvolved make their cases however he refuses to draw any conclusions. This might be a desision made in order to be fair (and for the most part he shows respect for both sides of the story) but it makes for a less interesting book.

   The story of Thomas' early life and the story of the Hearings went fast and read well, they had what most of the book lacked, but that was due to the drama inherant in the facts, not the writers writing.

   I would suggest reading this volume first before reading the acolates of the right or the birckbats of the left, in that sense it is a useful book.

   This book may deserve a better rating than I gave it. Greenya is not trying to be Bernard Cornwell but I find I just can't do better than what I have.




2. I decided to read this book after coming across Mr. Greenya giving an informal talk about his book on C-Span in Spring 2002. Listening to Mr. Greenya talk, although he was a rather dull and unorganized speaker, I had hope that his book would be as neutral a biography as possible. Mr. Greenya was very open in acknowledging that the Right and Left are very passionate when it comes to Clarence Thomas and that there is rarely any middle. This is true, but Mr. Greenya made it seem that he may be one of the rare few capable of standing in that middle ground. Sadly, he's not.

   The book opens on the very first page with the view of Thomas's confirmation hearings through the perspective of the porn-store owner that alleges to have sold videos to Judge Thomas. Greenya writes that this owner was "excited" that one of "his customers" was being nominated to the Supreme Court. Yeah... I bet.

   After that wonderful introduction, the book truly begins with Thomas's impoverished childhood in Pin Point, Georgia. Mr. Greenya moves quickly through this time period, as well as most of Thomas's young adult and college days. The majority of the 300-page book is taken up by quotes and opinions on Thomas, mostly concerning the Anita Hill ordeal and Thomas's rulings as a Supreme Court Justice. In these cases, the quotes opposing Thomas are without fail longer and preceding the quotes from the far fewer sources Mr. Greenya uses who are on Thomas's side. Mr. Greenya even goes so far as to uncritically reference the words of people such as Nan Aron and Eliot Minceberg of People for the American Way, an ultra-Left lobbyist group.

   Mr. Greenya does not seem like a vindictive or vitriolic man, like many (not all, of course) of the people who attack Clarence Thomas for anything he does. But he is clearly slanted to a certain political side not in agreement with Clarence Thomas's views. In prefacing the lengthy passage he uses from Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who successfully argued the Roe v. Wade case, Mr. Greenya characterizes her as "a fierce protector of the right she worked so hard to win for all American women..." Political opinions aside, it is simple fact that there are tens of millions of American women who do not consider legalized abortion to be any "right" that human beings have, no matter what the law says... rather, they consider it morally appalling. In this simplistic statement Mr. Greenya gives away his political persuasion more than he does at any other point in this book. His explanation of what it means to "bork" a judge is also astoundingly false, according to the widely held understanding of the word, even as defined by Microsoft's Encarta dictionary, for one. Mr. Greenya almost seems to be painfully twisting things to meet an agenda at times.

   I give the book 2 stars because Clarence Thomas rejected several requests, rightfully so, by Mr. Greenya to be interviewed for this book. I'm sure Judge Thomas's friends and fellow conservatives also knew what to expect and turned down Mr. Greenya as well, which had to be a major factor, beyond his control, in Mr. Greenya's lack of qualified, pro-Thomas sources throughout the book. But the slant and the errors are simply inexcusable in a purportedly neutral book, and accompanied with a boring narrative, this makes for one of the worst "biographies" I have ever read.




3. Silent Justice is a fascinating account of the personal and political development of a man who now holds one of the most influential positions in our nation, a man about whom people have very strong feelings ranging from admiration and respect to outright disdain. Although I personally disagree with Justice Thomas's positions on many issues, a friend recommended this book because of its keen perceptions of the character of a man who has the potential to influence all of our lives for years to come. As it turned out, I enjoyed the book immensely.

   Silent Justice is an unusually unbiased account compared with much that has been written about Thomas. Although the book allowed me to draw my own conclusions, I found John Greenya's treatment of the ways in which Thomas's opinions and style changed from his college days and throughout his years at the Equal Employment Opportunities commission and on the Federal bench to be particularly interesting. In addition, the description of Thomas's early life and the culture he grew up in provides a necessary backdrop for understanding his later life. The skillful blending of Thomas's professional and personal struggles, as well as the author's insights into the special challenges inherent in being a black man functioning at the upper levels of society and government is part of what makes this book so interesting.

   I would definitely recommend Silent Justice to anyone who wants to understand what makes Thomas tick or who wants a greater perspective on the various ways people achieve power and prestige in American government and society.




4. In the foreword to his book, Washington writer John Greenya wryly recounts the disdain with which friends and other persons greeted the news that he was writing a biography of Justice Clarence Thomas. Much of this disgust came from political liberals, who already knew what they wished to know about Justice Thomas, and who cared naught about anything else. 'Tis a a pity, that closed minds are so prevalent in modern political Washington. In reality, Justice Thomas' story is an up-from-the-muck saga of a kid from rural Georgia who grew up speaking an Island dialect -- unsureness of speech is the chief reason he seldom asks questions during SCOTUS sessions -- and went through Yale, perhaps America's toughest law school. The value of Greenya's book is that he reports, rather than lectures, and one comes away from Silent Justice with a better understanding of a man condemned to carry into history the qualifier "the controversial Justice Thomas." Steve Weinberg, who reviewed Silent Justice for The Legal Times, concluded, "For potential readers who have already decided beyond all doubt that Thomas is either a hero or a villain, this book will be maddening. for potential readers who have strong opinions about Thomas but are willing to revise those opinions on the basis of new evidence, this book will be revalatory." Amen



5. In the foreword to his book, Washington writer John Greenya wryly recounts the disdain with which friends and other persons greeted the news that he was writing a biography of Justice Clarence Thomas. Much of this disgust came from political liberals, who already knew what they wished to know about Justice Thomas, and who cared naught about anything else. 'Tis a a pity, that closed minds are so prevalent in modern political Washington. In reality, Justice Thomas' story is an up-from-the-muck saga of a kid from rural Georgia who grew up speaking an Island dialect -- unsureness of speech is the chief reason he seldom asks questions during SCOTUS sessions -- and went through Yale, perhaps America's toughest law school. The value of Greenya's book is that he reports, rather than lectures, and one comes away from Silent Justice with a better understanding of a man condemned to carry into history the qualifier "the controversial Justice Thomas." Steve Weinberg, who reviewed Silent Justice for The Legal Times, concluded, "For potential readers who have already decided beyond all doubt that Thomas is either a hero or a villain, this book will be maddening. for potential readers who have strong opinions about Thomas but are willing to revise those opinions on the basis of new evidence, this book will be revalatory." Amen

1 comments about Autobiography Of Charles Biddle, Vice-President Of The Supreme Executive Council Of Pennsylvania 1745-1821.

1. Autobiographical historical account of the history of the United States at the time of the Revolution. Link it to Timothy Pickerings July 4, 1823 speech and you have a good idea of the difficulty this country faced and how primitative it was and how well run the Revolutionary Effort was. Link this to the "Myth of July 4th" as printed in the William and Mary Historical Periodical and the story of July 4th becomes very clear. The United States of America was supported by a Secret Treaty that was very important to our founding. Those entrusted with keeping the Secret Treaty have disgrased this country.