“This is a book of courtroom war stories, drawn from my forty years of experience as an obscure lawyer for the underdog and the downtrodden.” So begins Renegade for Justice, a memoir of a public interest lawyer driven by the cause of justice. While the stories Stephen Saltonstall tells are entertaining, they are also instructive, providing, as he says, “an insider look at the American justice system, which is rigged against the poor and people of color and tolerates police perjury.” Renegade for Justice begins by telling the story of how and why a privileged kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, broke from family tradition and devoted his professional life to defending the defenseless in a justice system that is crippled by systemic injustice. Activist lawyer Stephen Saltonstall brings readers into the world of criminal defense by recounting narratives of his cases, including a successful attack on a Massachusetts death penalty statute, appeals of two notorious homicide cases (a serial murderer and a cop-killer), an effort to save the life of a little boy whose parents refused to give him the medical treatment he needed for acute lymphocytic leukemia, free speech cases for students and an environmentalist carpenter, litigation to save critical black bear and neotropical migratory songbird habitat from US Forest Service clear-cutting, and more. In a system biased against the public interest and the underprivileged, Saltonstall gives people a model for practicing values-based law. Channeling the spirit of radicals like William Kunstler, Saltonstall writes not only for activists who want to better understand our society, but also for those thinking about becoming a lawyer. As he writes in the preface, “I hope my stories will challenge those of you—you know who you are, you who dream of soft landings in the glittering halls of boring, soul-free law firms doing the bidding of the uber-rich and powerful—to visualize the alternative, a career that’s built on cases and causes that further the public interest, human rights, and care of the natural world.”
“This is a book of courtroom war stories, drawn from my forty years of experience as an obscure lawyer for the underdog and the downtrodden.” So begins Renegade for Justice, a memoir of a public interest lawyer driven by the cause of justice. While the stories Stephen Saltonstall tells are entertaining, they are also instructive, providing, as he says, “an insider look at the American justice system, which is rigged against the poor and people of color and tolerates police perjury.” Renegade for Justice begins by telling the story of how and why a privileged kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, broke from family tradition and devoted his professional life to defending the defenseless in a justice system that is crippled by systemic injustice. Activist lawyer Stephen Saltonstall brings readers into the world of criminal defense by recounting narratives of his cases, including a successful attack on a Massachusetts death penalty statute, appeals of two notorious homicide cases (a serial murderer and a cop-killer), an effort to save the life of a little boy whose parents refused to give him the medical treatment he needed for acute lymphocytic leukemia, free speech cases for students and an environmentalist carpenter, litigation to save critical black bear and neotropical migratory songbird habitat from US Forest Service clear-cutting, and more. In a system biased against the public interest and the underprivileged, Saltonstall gives people a model for practicing values-based law. Channeling the spirit of radicals like William Kunstler, Saltonstall writes not only for activists who want to better understand our society, but also for those thinking about becoming a lawyer. As he writes in the preface, “I hope my stories will challenge those of you—you know who you are, you who dream of soft landings in the glittering halls of boring, soul-free law firms doing the bidding of the uber-rich and powerful—to visualize the alternative, a career that’s built on cases and causes that further the public interest, human rights, and care of the natural world.”
This is the 30th anniversary edition of a book that was hailed on publication in 1966 as "fascinating" by Margaret L. Coit in the Saturday Review and as "masterly" by Henry F. Graff in the New York Times Book Review.The Constitution could not be more specific: "No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States." Yet, in over two centuries since these words were written, the American people, despite official disapproval, have chosen a political nobility. For generation after generation they have turned for leadership to certain families. They are America's political dynasties. Now, in the twentieth century, surprisingly, American political life seems to be largely peopled by those who qualify, in Stewart Alsop's phrase, as "People's Dukes." They are all around us Kennedys, Longs, Tafts, Roosevelts.Here is the panorama of America's political dynasties from colonial days to the present in fascinating profiles of sixteen of the leading families. Some, like the Roosevelts, have shown remarkable staying power. Others are all but forgotten, such as the Washburns, a family in which four sons of a bankrupt shopkeeper were elected to Congress from four different states. America's Political Dynasties investigates the roles of these families in shaping the nation and traces the whole pattern of political inheritance, which has been a little considered but unique and significant feature of American government and diplomacy. And in doing so, it also illuminates the lives and personalities of some two hundred often engaging, usually ambitious, sometimes brilliant, occasionally unscrupulous individuals.
The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson’s century-old dream of a “natural aristocracy.” Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.
An “entertaining and perceptive” history of America’s most exclusive families, from the Brahmins of New England to the Grandees of California (The Washington Post). America has always been a constitutionally classless society, yet an American aristocracy emerged anyway—a private club whose members run in the same circles and observe the same unwritten rules. Here, renowned social historian Stephen Birmingham reveals the inner workings of this aristocracy. He identifies which families in which cities have always mattered, and how they’ve defined America. America’s Secret Aristocracy offers an inside look at the estates, marriages, and financial empires of America’s most powerful families—from the Randolphs of Virginia and the Roosevelts of New York to the Carillos and Ortegas of California. With countless anecdotes about our nation’s elite, including interviews with their modern-day descendants, Birmingham presents colorful portraits that capture the true definition, essence, and customs of America’s aristocracy.
“Puleo has found a new way to tell the story with this well-researched and splendidly written chronicle of the Jamestown, its captain, and an Irish priest who ministered to the starving in Cork city...Puleo’s tale, despite the hardship to come, surely is a tribute to the better angels of America’s nature, and in that sense, it couldn’t be more timely.” —The Wall Street Journal The remarkable story of the mission that inspired a nation to donate massive relief to Ireland during the potato famine and began America's tradition of providing humanitarian aid around the world More than 5,000 ships left Ireland during the great potato famine in the late 1840s, transporting the starving and the destitute away from their stricken homeland. The first vessel to sail in the other direction, to help the millions unable to escape, was the USS Jamestown, a converted warship, which left Boston in March 1847 loaded with precious food for Ireland. In an unprecedented move by Congress, the warship had been placed in civilian hands, stripped of its guns, and committed to the peaceful delivery of food, clothing, and supplies in a mission that would launch America’s first full-blown humanitarian relief effort. Captain Robert Bennet Forbes and the crew of the USS Jamestown embarked on a voyage that began a massive eighteen-month demonstration of soaring goodwill against the backdrop of unfathomable despair—one nation’s struggle to survive, and another’s effort to provide a lifeline. The Jamestown mission captured hearts and minds on both sides of the Atlantic, of the wealthy and the hardscrabble poor, of poets and politicians. Forbes’ undertaking inspired a nationwide outpouring of relief that was unprecedented in size and scope, the first instance of an entire nation extending a hand to a foreign neighbor for purely humanitarian reasons. It showed the world that national generosity and brotherhood were not signs of weakness, but displays of quiet strength and moral certitude. In Voyage of Mercy, Stephen Puleo tells the incredible story of the famine, the Jamestown voyage, and the commitment of thousands of ordinary Americans to offer relief to Ireland, a groundswell that provided the collaborative blueprint for future relief efforts, and established the United States as the leader in international aid. The USS Jamestown’s heroic voyage showed how the ramifications of a single decision can be measured not in days, but in decades.
An enlightening and entertaining inside look at the lifestyles of America’s extremely wealthy from the bestselling author of “Our Crowd” It’s no secret that the rich are different from the rest of us. But the rich, as author Stephen Birmingham so insightfully points out, are also different from the very rich. There’s Society, and then there’s Real Society, and it takes multiple generations for families of the former to become entrenched in the latter. Real Society is not about the money—or rather, it’s not only about the money—it is about history, breeding, tradition, and most of all, the name. The Right People is an engrossing and illuminating journey through the customs and habits of the phenomenally wealthy, from the San Francisco elite to the upper crust of New York’s Westchester County. It is a marvelously anecdotal, intimately detailed overview of the lives of the American aristocracy: where they gather and dine; their games and sports, clubs and parties, friendships and feuds; their mating, marriage, and divorce rituals—a potpourri of priceless true stories featuring the Astors, Goulds, Vanderbilts, Vanderlips, Dukes, Biddles, and other lofty names from the pages of the Social Register.
Stephen F. Knott has spent his life grappling with the legacy of President John F. Kennedy: JFK was the first president Knott remembers, he worked for Ted Kennedy’s Senate campaign in 1976, and later he worked at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Moreover, Knott’s scholarly work on the American presidency has wrestled with Kennedy’s time in office and whether his presidency was ultimately a positive or negative one for the country. After initially being a strong Kennedy fan, Knott’s views began to sour during his time at the Library, eventually leading him to become a “Reagan Democrat.” The Trump presidency led Knott to revisit JFK, leading him once more to reconsider his views. Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy offers a nuanced assessment of the thirty-fifth president, whose legacy and impact people continue to debate to this day. Knott examines Kennedy through the lens of five critical issues: his interpretation of presidential power, his approach to civil rights, and his foreign policy toward Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. Knott also explores JFK’s assassination and the evolving interpretations of his presidency, both highly politicized subject matters. What emerges is a president as complex as the author’s shifting views about him. The passage of sixty years, from working in the Kennedy Library to a career writing about the American presidency, has given Knott a broader view of Kennedy’s presidency and allowed him to see how both the Left and the Right, and members of the Kennedy family, distorted JFK’s record for their own purposes. Despite the existence of over forty thousand books dealing with the man and his era, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy offers something new to say about this brief but important presidency. Knott contends that Kennedy’s presidency, for better or for worse, mattered deeply and that whatever his personal flaws, Kennedy’s lofty rhetoric appealed to what is best in America without invoking the snarling nativism of his least illustrious successor, Donald Trump.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.