Clark Davis, Hawthorne's Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, £32.00). Pp. 188. ISBN 0 8018 8098 X

• Published in: Journal of American Studies 2006, Vol.40 (3), p.655-655
• Main Author: LUSTIG, T. J.
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ethics; Politics; Reviews
• ISSN: 0021-8758; 1469-5154
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021875806322669

By examining a number of trials, over a broad historical period, this collection of essays dramatizes the fact that the application of the law of murder has always been uneven (34) in the US, despite measures instituted to try and secure due process and equal protection at both national and international levels. [...]the war has been used over six decades to justify American military conduct, most recently in Bushs visit to Auschwitz in May 2003 after the fall of Baghdad, where he invoked the memory of the six million in order to legitimize his attack on the axis of evil. [...]with the best democratic, moral and compassionate intentions, America has become a culture of hindsight judgement and self-righteousness, just as, in Western culture, temporal discrimination is the only legitimate discrimination, making us less inclined to bring to the past patient and soberly critical questions regarding its particularities and ambiguities. First published in German in 2000, this important study provides a history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and particularly its campaign for the right to vote.