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Robert H. Jackson: New Deal Lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, Nuremberg Prosector
Gail Jarrow
$24.42 hardcover
This biography about Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954)--the first published in fifty years--tells the fascinating story of an extraordinary man who rose from a childhood in rural western New York to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal inner circle during the Great Depression; to the position of attorney general while the nation prepared for World War II; to the Supreme Court bench when it ruled on such significant cases as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; and to chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial. Despite his remarkable accomplishments, Jackson never attended college or earned a law degree. Quotations from Jackson's personal letters, unpublished autobiography, and oral history bring to life some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. Illustrated with 100 photographs.
Robert H. Jackson: Country Lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, America’s Advocate
Eugene Gerhart
$64.65 signed by author; $107.75 leather-bound signed by the author
Published originally in 1958, this is the only full biography of Robert H. Jackson. The book follows Jackson’s life from his rural origins to his successful career in Washington and Nuremberg. Reprinted in 2003 by the William S. Hein & Company, the book is available exclusively from the Jackson Center. Two books in one volume, America’s Advocate: Robert H. Jackson and Lawyer’s Judge.
That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Robert H. Jackson
$21.54 Hard Cover
That Man is a newly discovered manuscript by Robert H. Jackson, edited and introduced by John Q. Barrett, the Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow at the Robert H. Jackson Center, with a forward by William E. Leuchtenburg, noted FDR biographer. Written in the early 1950’s before Jackson’s untimely death, the book is a unique account of the personality, conduct, greatness of character, and common humanity of “that man in the White House,” Franklin D. Roosevelt. Published by Oxford University Press.
Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown
Kevin J. McMahon
$20.00, Soft Cover
Kevin McMahon challenges the view that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was complacent on the issue of racial equality. McMahon argues that by strengthening the presidency and appointing a Supreme Court with a majority of rights-conscious liberals, FDR created a political and judicial situation that was receptive to civil rights claims, culminating in the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, of which Robert H. Jackson was one of the deciding justices, nearly ten years after FDR’s death.
Nuremberg, Infamy on Trial
Joseph E. Persico
$17.19. soft cover
Joseph Persico’s compelling narrative of the Nuremberg Trial is a dramatic and historical portrait of the most important trial of the 20th Century, as well as the basis for the TNT mini-series Nuremberg. It is the subject of a “Community Read” leading up to Mr. Persico’s appearance at the Jackson Center on June 12, 2006.
Becoming Justice Blackmun
Linda Greenhouse
$21.56, signed paperback
"Greenhouse, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with the New York Times, was the first print reporter to have access to the personal and official papers of Justice Blackmun, who died in 1999, five years after retiring from the Supreme Court. Those papers are Greenhouse's primary source as she looks back on the 24 years of Blackmun's service on the court. He wrote the majority opinion in the Roe v. Wade decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, but his papers reflect his personal struggle with the decision, as well as others on issues of the death penalty and sex discrimination. The immense collection includes correspondence with other jurists, including Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Greenhouse draws on personal papers to show Blackmun's personal journey, from entries in a childhood diary to the musings of a young lawyer hungering for partnership. This is an absorbing look at the personal and official concerns of a man who helped to shape American law and society." Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association.
Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone
James Patterson
$19.34, paperback
Patterson is eminently qualified to lead us through the saga of the Civil Rights movement as it relates to public education. The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision overturned a way of thinking that had persisted largely unchallenged since the end of the Civil War. A commonly accepted legal theory supported by an 1896 Supreme Court decision (Plessy v. Ferguson) was based, the author notes, upon archaic psychological theories that had been superseded by modern theory supporting a linkage between racial segregation and concomitant feelings of inferiority and damage to motivation and, hence, to learning. The author devotes the rest of the book to the tedious and thorny issues of implementation that he believes were needlessly protracted because the Court, in an effort to achieve unanimity and, feeling the need to placate the Southern states by abstaining from inflammatory rhetoric or threat of force, laid down only broad guidelines. The result, notes the author, is a process that has lately actually fluctuated back in the direction of permitting re-segregation in neighborhood schools where demographic changes resulting from private choice rather than public policy have produced a different racial mix. The issues are complex, profound, and ongoing, but the author provides balanced and extensive coverage. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up
Eli M. Rosenbaum
$27.96, hardcover
The inside story of the investigation that exposed Austrian president Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past discusses the high-ranking official who helped Waldheim perpetuate his lie, what Waldheim did in Hitler's armed forces, the investigators, and more.
Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans
Vivien Spitz
$25.81, hardcover
A chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of 22 men and 1 woman and the torturing and killing by experiment they authorised in the name of scientific research and patriotism. Doctors from Hell includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathiser tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg code, which set the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. A significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.
Enemy of the State: The Trial and Execution of Saddam Hussein
Michael A. Newton & Michael P. Scharf
$29.00, hardcover
At 12:21 p.m., on October 19, 2005, Saddam Hussein was escorted into the Courtroom of the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad for one of the most important and chaotic trials in history. For a year, two American law professors had led an elite team of experts who prepared the judges and prosecutors for “the mother of all trials.” Michael Scharf, a former State Department official who helped create the Yugoslavia Tribunal in 1993, and Michael Newton, then a professor at West Point, would confront such issues as whether the death penalty should apply, how to run a fair trial when political and military passions run so high, and which of Saddam’s many crimes should be prosecuted. Visit the Enemy of the State website.
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years during Genocide
Ambassador Robert Krueger
$28.00, hardcover
In 1994, while nations everywhere stood idly by, 800,000 people were slaughtered in eight weeks in Rwanda. Arriving as U.S. Ambassador to neighboring Burundi a few weeks later, Bob Krueger began drawing international attention to the genocide also proceeding in Burundi, where he sought to minimize the killing and to preserve its fledgling democratic government from destruction by its own army. From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi is a compelling eyewitness account of both a horrific and persistent genocide and of the ongoing efforts of many courageous individuals to build a more just society.
Krueger and his wife Kathleen graphically document the slaughter occurring all around them, as well as their repeated efforts to get the U.S. government and the international community to take notice and take action. Bob Krueger reconstructs the events of the military coup that precipitated the Burundi genocide and describes his efforts to uncover the truth by digging up graves and interviewing survivors. In straightforward and powerful language, Kathleen Krueger recounts her family's experience living amid civil war, including when she faced down a dozen AK-47-wielding African soldiers to save the life of a household worker.
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi shines a piercing light on a genocide that has gone largely unreported, and identifies those responsible for it. It also offers hope that as the truth emerges and the perpetrators are brought to account, the people of Burundi will at last achieve peace and reconciliation.
Justice at Nuremberg
Robert Conot
15.03, paperback
Here, for the first time in one volume, is the full story of crimes committed by the Nazi leaders and of the trials in which they were brought to judgement. Conot reconstructs in a single absorbing narrative not only the events at Nuremburg but the offenses with which the accused were charged. He brilliantly characterizes each of the twenty-one defendants, vividly presenting each case and inspecting carefully the process of indictment, prosecution, defense and sentencing.
Lazy B
Sandra Day O'Connor & H. Alan Day
$17.20, paperback
This memoir-cum-natural history evinces a clear picture of the American Southwest during the early to mid 20th century. Though O'Connor's name initially conjures images of austere black robes and the halls of justice, a very different person emerges from the childhood recalled here. A collaboration between O'Connor and her brother, the book recounts the lives of their parents "MO" and "DA" (pronounced "M.O." and "D.A.") and the colorful characters who helped run the Lazy B ranch. Growing up on the Gila River flowing from New Mexico to Arizona during the 1930s and '40s, the children quickly learned about the desert's abundant and dangerous creatures and plants. And no experience of Western ranch life is complete without the constant struggle for water leading to disputes over grazing rights. Though life was often harsh, MO kept her children educated and imbued with a sense of dignity. The authors' keen sense of loyalty to their childhood home endures: "Life at the ranch involved all of these components association with our old-time, long-suffering, good-natured cowboys; living in isolation with just one another and with few luxuries; ... seeing the plant, animal, insect, and bird life of the Southwest close at hand; and enjoying the love and companionship of MO and DA." O'Connor attended Stanford University, realizing the dreams of her grandfather and father; there, she took a class from a law school professor and started down the path leading to the U.S. Supreme Court. Day ran the Lazy B until its sale in 1986. The authors' delight in Lazy B enhances this quiet account of a bygone era.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Letters from Nuremberg: My Father's Narrative of a Quest for Justice
Christopher Dodd
$17.19, paperback
At the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after WWII, America's lead prosecutor, Chief Justice Robert Jackson, had an Achilles' heel: cross-examination. Thus emerged a young attorney, Thomas Dodd, whose inquisition of the brilliant Hermann Göring provided the centerpiece of the trials. Walter Cronkite, who covered Nuremberg, said years later that Dodd had saved the day. These letters reveal that Dodd felt slighted by Jackson early on and almost left before the trial. Unexpectedly, in 1990, his children discovered Dodd's voluminous correspondence from Nuremberg to his wife, Grace. What shines through these letters describing the trial and events leading up to it is the writer's unfussy concern for righteousness, which under the circumstances meant winning the case—and in the proper way. (One Nazi general he interrogated, Dodd said, really should not be in prison... he is and was persona non grata with the Nazis.) Dodd (who like his son, presidential hopeful Christopher, later became a senator) was a very good writer; his descriptions of the trial and the defendants (Göring reminded him of a captured lion) are evocative. These excerpted letters make for fascinating reading and must be considered an essential addition to Nuremberg studies.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
Number the Stars
Lois Lowry
$10.78, signed paperback
The evacuation of Jews from Nazi-held Denmark is one of the great untold stories of World War II. On September 29, 1943, word got out in Denmark that Jews were to be detained and then sent to the death camps. Within hours the Danish resistance, population and police arranged a small flotilla to herd 7,000 Jews to Sweden. Lois Lowry fictionalizes a true-story account to bring this courageous tale to life. She brings the experience to life through the eyes of 10-year-old Annemarie Johannesen, whose family harbors her best friend, Ellen Rosen, on the eve of the round-up and helps smuggles Ellen's family out of the country. Number the Stars won the 1990 Newbery Medal.
Simple Justice
Richard Kluger
$26.95, hardcover
Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown decision, this update and expansion of the widely acclaimed original work, published in 1976, goes beyond portrayals of the major players involved in the decision--the NAACP legal team, including Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston; the defender of states' rights, John Davis; and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who brokered a unanimous decision shortly after joining the Court; and the complainants, who undertook personal risk to challenge the doctrine of separate but equal. In this volume, Kluger also analyzes the nation's progress on race issues in the intervening 28 years since the book was first published. In a new chapter, he looks at the politics and policies of the Nixon and Reagan eras--courting the South through retrenchment on racial integration and frontal attacks on busing--up to the current national obsession with colorblindness that has fostered a hypersegregation that mirrors conditions before the Brown decision. This is a powerful resource for readers interested in reviewing the particulars of Brown and the changes that have occurred since that landmark ruling. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association.
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
Jeff Shesol
$30.13, hardcover
Lengthier than FDR vs. the Constitution, by Burt Solomon (2009), an account of the 1937 political fracas between the president, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, Shesol’s history of the same episode expands with detail about the origin of Roosevelt’s proposal to reorganize the federal judiciary. It sprang from liberals’ infuriation with the conservative Court’s invalidation of some New Deal programs; Shesol’s quotations of New Dealers’ diaries well convey the incandescence of their fury. He also attends to Washington’s sociopolitical atmosphere, such as the Gridiron Dinner’s spoofs of the Supremes and FDR’s landslide reelection, which set the stage for Roosevelt’s hubristic moment. After providing background to FDR’s reform plan, which its opponents (and history) branded a court-packing scheme, Shesol continues with a narrative of the political battle that erupted. A book sure to recruit history readers, especially those eyeing present political currents. --Gilbert Taylor
Tales of an American Soldier
Werner H. Von Rosentiel
$19.34, paperback
This is the true tale of a German lawyer and former member of Hitler's army who becomes an American lawyer and is drafted into the U.S. Army. Subjected to interrogations and posted to units where the army can keep him away from anything important, this private pulls a lot of KP, gets sent to a unit consisting of enemy aliens, and assigned to a Quartermaster Laundry Battalion. When it is determined that he is not a spy, he is shipped to Europe with an airborne unit. Eventually the army uses his background to its advantage, promoting him to second lieutenant and sending him to the War Crimes Unit in Germany to read secret files. He encounters Hermann Goering, Albert Speer and other Nazis when is assigned to Justice Jackson's staff for the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne
$9.69, paperback
This work was set in Berlin, 1942. When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. But, Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than what meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
Jeffrey Toobin
$17.19, paperback
It's not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker legal writer Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees as an almost primal attunement to a middle-of-the-road public consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist and Scalia ended up bitter old men, their rigorous constitutional doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates' compromises. The author deftly distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court's internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials (inept and unsavory is his verdict on the Court's intervention in the 2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court right in the thick of American life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
The Nuremberg Interviews
Leon Goldensohn
$19.34
"How did you figure a six-month-old Jewish infant must be killed—was it an enemy?" Goldensohn asked Otto Ohlendorf at Nuremberg. "In the child," explained the SS lieutenant general, "we see the grown-up." Goldensohn, an army psychiatrist, was assigned in 1946 to the Nuremberg trials. In his evaluations of the German defendants, he quickly got over his shock at their casual acceptance of Nazi doctrine and refusal to take personal responsibility for their acts. Goldensohn died in 1961, and recently his brother Eli collected the long-stored transcripts edited by historian Gellately (The Gestapo and German Society). Goldensohn tried to coax childhood memories from the men, seeking early motivations for later monstrousness, and found little to go on. Most were ordinary people who took unexpected opportunities in politically festering interwar Germany. Few expressed even meager repentance, blaming betrayal of the Nazi ideal for the thwarting of the Garden of Eden promised by Hitler, who remained for them a political and military genius. Goldensohn's conversations with these men are perturbing because most of the them seem like many of us except for the circumstances that lured them into opportunistic deviance. Goldensohn may not have left a headline-making legacy of belated revelations, but he has complicated further the tapestry of evil.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
Truman and the Steel Seizure Case
Maeva Marcus
$26.88, paperback
Government seizure of the nation’s strikebound steel mills on 8 April 1952 stands as one of President Harry S Truman’s most controversial actions, representing an unprecedented use of presidential power. On 8 June 1952 the United States Supreme Court invalidated Truman’s order with its monumental decision in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer. The history and significance of this case constitute the subject of Maeva Marcus’s meticulously researched, brilliantly analyzed, and authoritative study. From Truman’s initial assertion of "inherent" executive power under the Constitution to the High Court’s seven opinions, Marcus assesses the influence of the case on the doctrine of separation of powers and, specifically, the nature and practice of executive authority. First published in 1977 (Columbia University Press), and reissued here in paperback with a new foreword by Louis Fisher, this book remains the definitive account of the Steel Seizure incident and its political and legal ramifications.
Tyranny on Trial: The Trial of the Major German War Criminals at the End of the World War II at Nuremberg Germany 1945-1946
Whitney Harris
$19.95, paperback
First published by Southern Methodist Press in 1954. Tyranny on Trial relates the full story of the historic Nuremberg Trial. In this classic work, now in revised and expanded edition, Whitney R. Harris presents indisputable evidence of the horrific crimes of Adolph Hitler and Nazism, and irrefutable proof of the realities of the Holocaust.
Witness to Nuremberg
Richard Sonnenfeldt
$16.15, paperback
In this gripping memoir by the chief American interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, Richard Sonnenfeldt recounts a remarkable life. By the time he was 18, Sonnenfeldt had grown up in Germany, escaped to England, been deported to Australia as a "German enemy alien", arrived in the U.S., and joined the U.S. army. By age 22 he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, when he was appointed chief interpreter for the American prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials. During his service, he spent pretrial time with Hermann Goering as well as other top Nazi leaders like von Ribbentrop, Rudolph Hoess, and Julius Streicher, the infamous editor of the anti-Semitic Der Sturmer. An engineer in later life, he was a principal developer of color TV and computer technology and a key player in NASA's preparation of the first moon shot.