Sherry Chandler

The NYTimes Reviews Books

David Margolick on Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine, particularly Sandra Day O’Connor:

A lifelong Republican — in her memos to Rehnquist, she routinely referred to her party as “we” and “us” — O’Connor played tennis with Barbara Bush, watched approvingly while George W. Bush rose as a “compassionate conservative,” looked “stricken” to fellow partygoers on election night 2000 when Al Gore appeared to have won. She determined early on in the litigation to stop the Florida recount, and in the five-to-four decision that followed, her vote was decisive. But her reasoning, as Toobin notes, was more visceral than legal — she hated untidiness, blamed Florida voters for being too stupid to follow instructions and thought Americans wanted the matter settled. She was wrong on both the facts and the law. It was an egregious performance, one that historians will skewer. Or maybe not, given who usually writes these histories.

Amid a torrent of criticism, O’Connor clearly held off-the-record conversations with reporters, trying to justify what she had done. Toobin does not mention this, nor the more general issue of the justices’ surreptitious ties to the press. Perhaps it’s too much to expect. Or perhaps he was just too busy taking down all of O’Connor’s ire, because she spends an awful lot of “The Nine” either annoyed, affronted or downright appalled by the events of the past few years.

She was appalled, for instance, by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, whom she considered extreme, polarizing, moralistic and — to use her favorite word — “unattractive.” She was appalled by how the Bush administration pandered to the religious right in the Terri Schiavo case. She was appalled by the nomination of Harriet Miers. And she’s been appalled, too, by Bush’s stances on affirmative action, the war on terror and the war in Iraq. And how did she feel when Bush brushed off the report of the Iraq Study Group, to which she belonged? She was appalled. And she was really, really appalled that the lower-court judge whose dissent in one crucial case she deemed “repugnant” — he’d have upheld a Pennsylvania law requiring wives to notify husbands before getting abortions — was the very man Bush picked to replace her: Samuel Alito.

A person is welcome to her opinions, but given O’Connor’s crucial role in putting Bush in office, such constant off-the-record carping is really a bit much.

William Saletan on Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought

Metaphor turns out to be our crucial talent. It parlays crude animal knowledge into human advancement. From physical destinations, we extrapolate a conception of goals. From physical journeys, we build an understanding of relationships. Metaphors structure even our most advanced ideas: heat works like fluid, atoms like solar systems, genes like code, evolution like design. In each case, language has fossilized the construction process: “heat flow,” “genetic code,” “natural selection.”

Some thinkers worry that this power to frame perceptions can run away with us. In politics, the linguist George Lakoff has warned, “frames trump facts.” In this view, taxes can be depicted as burdens or as membership fees, driving public opinion this way or that. Pinker rejects Lakoff’s ideas, which have become fashionable among Democratic strategists. “Metaphors are generalizations,” he argues. Their implications can be tested against reality. Lakoff’s proposal to reframe taxes as membership fees flunks the test: if you don’t pay your membership fees, you lose your benefits; but if you don’t pay your taxes, you go to jail.

Nature isn’t the only external standard by which we can evaluate and revise frames and claims. Social behavior can test them, too. If frames overpower rational criticism, Pinker asks, then why do Lakoff and other quasi-relativists write books rationally criticizing frames? The medium belies the message. The medium isn’t just reason; it’s language — and language isn’t the manifestation of one mind; it’s the joint manifestation of millions. The reason language works is that it reflects the world as we jointly experience it.

Laurie Goodstein on the Standardized Chapel Library Project

The federal Bureau of Prisons is under pressure from members of Congress and religious groups to reverse its decision to purge the shelves of prison chapel libraries of all religious books and materials that are not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.

Outrage over the bureau’s decision has come from both conservatives and liberals, who say it is inappropriate to limit inmates to a religious reading list determined by the government.

…

Spokesmen for the Bureau of Prisons said it was not reconsidering its policy. The bureau said it was prompted to act by a report in 2004 from the inspector general of the Department of Justice, which mentioned that since most prisons did not catalog their library materials, radical books that incite violence and hatred could infiltrate the shelves.

Initially, the bureau set out to take an inventory of every book and item in its chapel libraries. When the list grew to the tens of thousands, the bureau decided instead to generate lists of acceptable books and materials — about 150 items for each of 20 religions or religious categories. It calls that plan the Standardized Chapel Library Project.

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