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Thomas E. Ricks
Positive New York Times Book Review Incongruity rests at the core of Thomas E. Ricks’s innovative and provocative book ... Ricks’s book contains several estimable features. The novel military framing, for example, allows Ricks to offer engaging reappraisals of some civil rights figures ... Moreover, rather than viewing the conflict as existing only between segregationists and integrationists, Ricks wisely and consistently highlights the important tensions and cleavages that existed within the civil rights movement itself. Far too many examinations of this history gloss over such conflicts ... To his great credit, Ricks does not refrain from criticism of even the most esteemed civil rights figures when he believes that their strategic and tactical decisions warrant it ... Waging a Good War does, however, sometimes miss the mark. Ricks offers a blizzard of war analogies, routinely breaking the narrative momentum in order to usher military and diplomatic leaders onstage ... Too often, Ricks uses the military prism to reach conclusions that will be familiar to even the most casual student of civil rights ... Ricks’s reading of events also occasionally descends into the platitudinous, offering insights that apply to almost any pursuit ... These reservations, though, do not negate the significance of Ricks’s powerful analytical frame. The book could prove highly influential, inspiring scholars to use the lens of military history to re-examine the victories and defeats of other consequential social movements.
Brad Snyder
Positive The Atlantic Brad Snyder’s comprehensive, compelling, and generally admiring biography arrives at a moment when the justice’s stock may, in some quarters, seem poised for a rebound ... Snyder challenges conventional assessments of Frankfurter by skillfully placing him into the rich, changing context of American liberalism during the first six decades of the 20th century ... Snyder’s portrait of Frankfurter certainly cannot be accused of concealing the justice’s rather substantial warts. Snyder does, however, cast him in a flattering light, depicting the justice largely as he depicted himself—as a champion of democracy, and therefore an opponent of juristocracy.
Christine Montross
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... a haunting and harrowing indictment of the deep psychological damage inflicted by the nation’s punitive structures ... Montross is a gifted, often compelling storyteller ... Montross traveled extensively across this country, bearing witness to how jails and prisons both initiate and intensify mental illness. The strongest portions of her searing book appear in its parade of alarming vignettes. I will not soon forget some of her grotesque images ... Montross’s typically formidable narrative skills sometimes go awry, most notably when she shoehorns herself and her family into the story...Such passages needlessly distract from the gravity of her subject ... This tendency reaches its nadir in the book’s conclusion, where Montross recollects writing at a lake cottage during winter and wrestling with how to handle a coyote outside her window that is behaving strangely. The episode stretches over five pages and produces at best a modest payoff: a belabored analogy for society’s response to the spectacle of mental illness, the way we allow fear and a desire for control to overcome more humane impulses. Waiting for an Echo would have been improved had these discursions been excised ... Montross’s travelogue-based approach may also leave some readers pining for a comprehensive treatment of this issue, one more attentive to scholarly debate ... Yet Montross’s stumbles should not overshadow her significant achievement. I hope that she successfully pricks the nation’s conscience about our shameful punishment of mental illness. It is impossible to read her captivating account without concluding that our various departments of corrections are themselves in intense need of correcting.
Michael J. Graetz & Linda Greenhouse
Positive The Washington Post ...[an] ambitious and engaging new book ... Instead of comparing the Burger court only with its institutional predecessor, the authors also examine the institution in light of its two successors: the Rehnquist court, beginning in 1986, and the Roberts court, beginning in 2005...As the authors contend, 'Warren Burger’s Court played a crucial role in establishing the conservative legal foundation for the even more conservative Courts that followed' ... Graetz and Greenhouse’s work serves as an important corrective, demonstrating that the Burger court demands far more sustained scrutiny and analysis than legal scholarship has generally afforded it ... For all its considerable virtues, the book sometimes strains to construe the Burger court as a relentlessly conservatizing force instead of the more heterodox institution that it actually was ... Still, even when the book’s arguments may not fully persuade, they invariably provoke serious thought on how legal decisions made in our nation’s relatively recent past could have assumed a radically different form.