We've noted a few reviews of Michael Waldman's The Second Amendment: A Biography (Simon & Schuster) in recent weeks. This week The New York Times reviews Waldman's book alongside This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get you Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles Cobb Jr. (Basic Books). There is also an excerpt from Cobb's book in Salon.Emily Bazelon has a review in The Washington Post of Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality by David Boies and Theodore Olson (Viking).
"Boies and Olson are understandably proud of the role they played. Who can blame them? But it’s patronizing and completely wrong to insinuate that they got the strategy right while the movement got it wrong. And it is just asking for trouble to exaggerate their own importance at the expense of Bonauto, Wolfson, and all the gay rights groups and activists who stood with them. Where is their book? As the writer E.J. Graff points out, it has yet to be written. Enough already with the credit-hogging straight version of gay history. I want to read the story about gay marriage that gay parents will tell their children."There's still more reviews of Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz's Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution (Henry Holt & Co.) as well as Scalia: Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy (Simon & Schuster). The LA Times has a review of both, here. And, there's another review of Scalia: A Court of One in the Washington Independent Review of Books.
The July 10 issue of The New York Review of Books has two reviews of note. The first is "Partial Disclosure," a review of four works about the NSA and Snowden, including Luke Harding's The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (Vintage) and No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald (Metropolitan). The second is David Bell's review of Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre by Jonathan Israel (Princeton University Press).The Federal Lawyer has new online reviews. If your interested in more reading on government surveillance read this review of Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance by Heidi Boghosian (City Lights Books).
And over at New Books in History readers can listen to an interview with J. Matthias Determann about his new book, Historiography in Saudi Arabia: Globalization and the State in the Middle East (Tauris).
