Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2003Personal rights, such as the right to procreate—or not—and the right to die generate endless debate. This book maps out the legal, political, and ethical issues swirling around personal rights. Howard Ball shows how the Supreme Court has grappled with the right to reproduce and to abort, and takes on the issue of auto-euthanasia and assisted suicide, from Karen Ann Quinlan through Kevorkian and just recently to the Florida case of the w...

In this "entertaining and informative" memoir, a Jewish civil rights activist recounts living in Mississippi and fighting for racial equity (Howard Winant, co-author of Racial Formation in the United States).In Taking the Fight South, distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball focuses on six years, from 1976 to 1982, when he and his Jewish family moved from New York City to Starkville, Mississippi, where he received a tenured po...

Few episodes in the modern civil rights movement were more galvanizing or more memorialized than the brutal murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—idealists eager to protect and promote the rights of black Americans, even in the deep and very dangerous South. In films like Mississippi Burning and popular folk songs, these young men have been venerated as martyrs. Even so, the landmark legal dimensions of their murder case have until now remained largely los...

The “ethnic cleansing” that has gripped the Balkans for much of this decade is but another chapter in the long history of man’s inhumanity to man. Hopeful but unflinching in the face of such realities, Howard Ball’s book focuses on international efforts to punish perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes. Combining history, politics, and critical analysis, he revisits the killing fields of Cambodia, documents the three-month Hutu “machete genocide” of about 800,000 Tutsi villagers in R...

Twice denied admission to a California medical school despite better grades and test scores than successful minority applicants, Allan Bakke took his grievance to court and set off a major controversy over affirmative action. Bakke claimed that he was a victim of reverse discrimination, and his case has been considered by many as the most important civil rights decision since the end of segregation—and also one of the most difficult ever heard by the Supreme Court.Howard Ball now r...

This book presents the background and history of genocide, the key issues associated with this worldwide crime, and the problems inherent in preventing its occurrence.In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), legally defining the crime of genocide for the first time. Amazingly, the United States did not ratify this international agreement until nearly 40 years later, when President Rea...

This book provides both an overview of the core dilemma in America--racism and the deadly impact it has had on American society--and an account of the ways in which the book's contributors have attempted to deal with this dilemma in their own teaching practice.Two core essays explore the theoretical and historical issues involved in defining "races" and "ethnic groups" in the West, and issues of racial and ethnic inequality in American society. The volume then examines a variety of...

While the specifics of individual wars vary, they share a common epilogue: the task of finding and identifying the “disappeared.” The Bosnian war of the early 1990s, which destroyed the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, is no exception. In Working in the Killing Fields, Howard Ball focuses on recent developments in the technology of forensic science and on the work of forensic professionals in Bosnia following that conflict. Ball balances the examination of complex features of new fo...

This book provides a comprehensive and contemporary examination of the right-to-die issues facing society now that vast improvements in public health care and medicine have resulted in people not only living longer but taking much longer to die—often in great pain and suffering.In 1900, the average age at which people died in America was 47 years of age; the primary causes of death were tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses. In the 21st century, as a result ...

"Ball's arguments are concise, compelling, and backed with considerable case law. This volume is highly recommended for upper-level undergraduates and above in law, philosophy, and the medical humanities interested in the 'right to die' debates. Summing up: Highly recommended." —ChoiceOver thepast hundred years, average life expectancy in America has nearly doubled, duelargely to scientific and medical advances, but also as a consequence of saferworking conditi...

Thurgood Marshall's extraordinary contribution to civil rights and overcoming racism is more topical than ever, as the national debate on race and the overturning of affirmative action policies make headlines nationwide. Howard Ball, author of eighteen books on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, has done copious research for this incisive biography to present an authoritative portrait of Marshall the jurist.Born to a middle-class black family in "Jim Crow" Baltimore at th...

Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosni...