"Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., was both a radical egalitarian and a prime mover on the United States Supreme Court. From 1956 to 1990 - through the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist eras - he effected both judicial and social change via decisions on racial desegregation, pornography, the application of the Bill of Rights to the states, privacy, and abortion. Brennan's stamp is on nearly every contemporary American social issue. A Justice for All, the first biography of Justice Brennan, gathers his considerable achievements in the context of his times and his life." "Brennan had been the original "stealth" nominee to the United States Supreme Court. Having served eight years as a state court judge in New Jersey, Brennan was a total unknown on the national stage when President Eisenhower limited his search for a new justice to a Northeastern Catholic currently serving on a state court. In a rancorous confirmation hearing that foreshadowed events of the eighties and nineties, Brennan tangled with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Taking his place on a Supreme Court bench surrounded by such towering figures as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William Douglas, and John Harlan, Brennan observed, "I felt a little like the mule at the Kentucky Derby."" "But in a career that would span one-third of a century, Brennan proved to be one of the most visionary and influential justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Not content merely to interpret the Constitution, Brennan rewrote American law in the fields of obscenity, criminal rights, affirmative action, and privacy." "This account of the life of an extremely private and little-understood man brings the reader face to face with the clash of intellectual forces that created the landmark rulings of the Warren court. In the midst of these colliding giants was an unpresuming lawyer from Newark who took Warren's broad concepts and wrote them into law; who convinced a firebrand like William O. Douglas, that, at times, it paid to compromise; and who willingly braved personal and professional confrontations with his former Harvard University law professor, Felix Frankfurter." "In his three years of research, author Kim Isaac Eisler utilized the private papers of Justices Brennan, Douglas, Harlan, Warren, and Black, among others; interviewed dozens of former Brennan clerks; and found childhood friends and onetime law partners to reveal what lit the fire inside this history-making judicial activist." "A Justice for All is the remarkable tale of a man who operated within the marble walls of the Supreme Court with the consummate skills of a dealmaker, creating majorities, writing laws, and all the while steering clear of political fire. In so doing, he succeeded in changing American law and society."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Brethren is the first detailed behind-the-scenes account of the Supreme Court in action. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong have pierced its secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the Chief and Associate Justices—maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making decisions that affect every major area of American life.

Features the architecture and designs inside the studios the artist created in Chicago, using color illustrations and a brief biography.

William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division.

Getting the right diagnosis is a key aspect of health care - it provides an explanation of a patient's health problem and informs subsequent health care decisions. The diagnostic process is a complex, collaborative activity that involves clinical reasoning and information gathering to determine a patient's health problem. According to Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, diagnostic errors-inaccurate or delayed diagnoses-persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients. It is likely that most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences. Diagnostic errors may cause harm to patients by preventing or delaying appropriate treatment, providing unnecessary or harmful treatment, or resulting in psychological or financial repercussions. The committee concluded that improving the diagnostic process is not only possible, but also represents a moral, professional, and public health imperative. Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, a continuation of the landmark Institute of Medicine reports To Err Is Human (2000) and Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001), finds that diagnosis-and, in particular, the occurrence of diagnostic errorsâ€"has been largely unappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care. Without a dedicated focus on improving diagnosis, diagnostic errors will likely worsen as the delivery of health care and the diagnostic process continue to increase in complexity. Just as the diagnostic process is a collaborative activity, improving diagnosis will require collaboration and a widespread commitment to change among health care professionals, health care organizations, patients and their families, researchers, and policy makers. The recommendations of Improving Diagnosis in Health Care contribute to the growing momentum for change in this crucial area of health care quality and safety.

A captivating book about the emotional and literary power of the lives we might have lived had our chances or choices been different. We each live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children—every decision precludes another. But what if you’d gone the other way? It can be a seductive thought, even a haunting one. Andrew H. Miller illuminates this theme of modern culture: the allure of the alternate self. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have. What forces encourage us to think this way about ourselves, and to identify with fictional and poetic voices speaking from the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all these sources, revealing the beauty, the power, and the struggle of our unled lives. In an elegant and provocative rumination, he lingers with other selves, listening to what they say. Peering down the path not taken can be frightening, but it has its rewards. On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are.