Last weekend we noted a few reviews of Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books). This week Baptist was interviewed on New Books in History. Baptist has also shared an excerpt of the book in Salon."Instead of his influence being confined to a discrete set of writings or narrow doctrinal categories, Scalia has shaped modern American law in ways more overarching and even elemental. Elena Kagan, when she was dean of Harvard Law School, expressed this point vividly while presiding over Scalia’s return to his alma mater in 2007. “His views on textualism and originalism, his views on the role of judges in our society, on the practice of judging, have really transformed the terms of legal debate in this country,” Kagan said. “[Scalia] is the justice who has had the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about the law.” This statement can be understood to identify Scalia’s influence as occurring within at least three distinct arenas, each requiring some elaboration."
Over on New Books in Law, Jeremy Lipschultz is interviewed about his book, Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law, and Ethics (Routledge).
H-Net adds a review of Phillip Deery's Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (Fordham University Press).
If you haven't had your fill of reviews for Henry Kissinger's World Order (Penguin Press), you can read two in The New York Times this weekend: one by Michiko Kakutani titled "Long View of History Includes Today", and a second by John Micklethwait titled "As the World Turns.""Deery concludes with a discussion of the career of New York lawyer O. John Rogge in chapter 5. Considered by historians to be “one of the country’s most prominent radical lawyers,” Rogge is perhaps best known for his role in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg conspiracy to commit espionage case, as legal counsel to David Greenglass (p. 135). Rogge also provided counsel for the defense in the Smith Act case of 1949, and defended the JAFRC. He left the Democratic Party in 1947, shifting to the progressive American Labor Party (ALP) and running on the ALP judicial slate in 1948, but he never joined the CPUSA. Considered a left-wing, radical, fellow traveler, he publicly repudiated communism in 1951 and took on the case of Greenglass."
Also in The New York Times this weekend is a review of Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David (Knopf) by Lawrence Wright.
"Wright reminds us that Carter’s Camp David was an act of surpassing political courage. At a time of double-digit inflation, sluggish economic growth, soaring gas prices and a real-time revolution in Iran, he dropped everything for two weeks and took a long shot at creating peace. He won his treaty, but lost his presidency because most Americans blamed him for not doing more to address the things they really cared about."The Nation reviews two books in the piece, "Language and Blood: In 1941, genocide broke out in Croatia, and we still cannot explain way," including 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning by Slavko Goldstein (NYRB) and The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and Theory by Nevenko Bartulin (Brill).
