Just Books
by Deborah L. Rhode
"It hurts to be beautiful" is a cliché I grew up with. "It hurts not to be beautiful" is a truth I acquired on my own....
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The First Enabler
Jesse Kornbluth on Laura Bush's Spoken from the Heart
All men marry up.
I say that often, and the fact that I generally say it within hearing range of smart, attractive women doesn't make it less true....
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Totally Radical!
The Tea Party Discovers a Taste for….. Saul Alinsky!
Sanford Horwitt, Alinsky's biographer, reflects on the new radicals and their new rules.
Short:
Walking Tall When You're Not Tall At All
by John Schwartz
This book is not really for you. That is to say, yes! Go ahead and buy it! But in fact, "Short" is written for young people -- kids from about the age of 12 to 17. It's about being short, which is a topic I know a lot about. At five foot three inches tall, my truth is that I am a short American.
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Justice Stevens' Complicated Relationship with Free Speech: What questions did the Justice's first biographers ignore?
John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life by Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman, reviewed by Burt Neuborne.
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2010 Take Back America: A Battle Plan by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, reviewed by Naomi Wolf.
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A Congressman, A Murder And A Botched Police Investigation
Finding Chandra: A True Washington Murder Mystery by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, reviewed by Maggie Barron.
What is the best novel about justice?
Jonathan Franzen, Author, The Corrections:
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is the most underappreciated of Mark Twain's novels and one of the best books ever written about American slavery. It's about an antebellum small-town Missouri lawyer who dabbles in the new science of fingerprinting; it's also, deftly, comically, about justice in every sense of the word.
Alice Walker, Author, Overcoming Speechlessness:
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. In the character of Jean Valjean, Les Miserables shows that what society narrowly considers criminal behavior is often caused by impoverishment, hunger, and desperation to which society has made insufficient address. I too believe that most “criminal” behavior has desperation, and the kinds may be varied, at its root. A truly just society would mean no one who is starving, or seeing those around her starving, would be punished for stealing bread.
Tom Wolfe, Author, I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel:
I can think of many good novels in which justice triumphs and many in which it crashes and burns. But as for how justice lives, I don't know how you can top Bleak House. Justice lives not in this world but in a play world. In Homo Ludens, the law is Huizinga's favorite example of . . . Man Playing. Not for nothing, he says, is a court of law called a court. It is by no means a case of mere linguistic coincidence. Justice, he says, is not a court of law's concern. The game is. Is there or has there ever been a prosecutor who got up in front of a jury thinking about justice? Has there ever been a civil lawyer who cared so much about justice that he would stand up in court and utter a word that wasn't paid for and put in his mouth? Of course not, says Huizinga. Homo Ludens! And there you have the story--and the message--of Bleak House. How would Dickens know? His first job was recording court testimony verbatim for newspapers.
Elizabeth Alexander, Professor at Yale, Poet, and Author, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color:
Alice Walker's Meridian. This is a novel that shows us that the beloved quest for justice that characterized the Civil Rights Movement was not without its challenges and conundrums."
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Lawyer and Author, Prozac Nation:
The best novel about justice I've ever read is also my favorite book: The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer. But i'm not sure it's a novel exactly.
Let us know your answer, here.
- Mark Tushnet on Why The Constitution Matters
- John Grisham's Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer
- Khalil Muhammad: Thoughts on Race and Crime and the Making of Modern America
