The Rights of the People [Kindle Edition]

David K. Shipler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 19, 2011

From the best-selling author of The Working Poor, an impassioned, incisive look at the violations of civil liberties in the United States that have accelerated over the past decade—and their direct impact on our lives.

How have our rights to privacy and justice been undermined? What exactly have we lost? Pulitzer Prize–winner David K. Shipler searches for the answers to these questions by examining the historical expansion and contraction of our fundamental rights and, most pointedly, the real-life stories of individual men and women who have suffered. This is the account of what has been taken—and of how much we stand to regain by protesting the departures from the Bill of Rights.

With keen insight and telling detail, Shipler describes how the Supreme Court’s constitutional rulings play out on the streets as Washington, D.C., police officers search for guns in poor African American neighborhoods, how a fruitless search warrant turns the house of a Homeland Security employee upside down, and how the secret surveillance and jailing of an innocent lawyer result from an FBI lab mistake. Each instance—often as shocking as it is compelling—is a clear illustration of the risks posed to individual liberties in our modern society. And, in Shipler’s hands, each serves as a powerful incitement for a retrieval of these precious rights.

A brilliant, immeasurably important book for our time.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The wars on crime and terrorism have turned into a war on privacy and freedom, according to this provocative but sometimes overwrought exposé of infringements of the Bill of Rights. In this first of two volumes, Pulitzer-winning journalist Shipler (Arab and Jew) focuses on the Fourth Amendment's guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, and finds violations that remind him of his days covering the Soviet Union. Most shocking is his ride-along reportage on the Washington, D.C., Police Department's bullying searches for guns and drugs in black neighborhoods. (Random stop-and-frisks and automobile searches are so ubiquitous, he observes, that African-American men automatically raise their shirts to expose their waistbands when cops approach; residents are puzzled when he tells them they have the right to refuse police searches.) When the author turns to less intrusive surveillance, like the Bush administration's warrantless wire-tapping, his outrage-"government snooping destroys the inherent poetry of privacy"-is less compelling; he writes as if search engines sifting e-mails are tantamount to Hessians kicking in doors. (Apr.)
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Review

“Important . . . I suspect Shipler’s arguments will speak to . . . most Americans . . . The Rights of the People is timely, eloquent, solid, fair-minded and, on almost every page, upsetting.”
            -Craig Seligman, Bloomberg
 
“If you ever wondered how the erosion of constitutional liberties affects ordinary people, this is the book to read. Shipler shows us, through carefully drawn and often moving accounts of real-life encounters between individuals and the state, the true cost of sacrificing liberty for security.”
            -David Cole, author of No Equal Justice
 
“This powerful book demonstrates the reality behind abstract debates about liberty and security, and shows us what happens when liberty starts to erode.”
           -Linda Greenhouse, author of Becoming Justice Blackmun 
 
“David Shipler has done something extraordinary. He took the guarantees in our Constitution and explored, on the ground, how they were actually being applied in the lives of Americans. The result is a wonderful book that shows how large a gap there is between constitutional promises and reality.”
            -Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon’s Trumpet
 
“An insightful analysis of the erosion of basic civil liberties within the past decade . . . A sobering look at the rights Americans take for granted.”
            -Starred review, Booklist
 
“Shipler’s sure grasp of frequently impenetrable Supreme Court decisions (translated nicely for the non-lawyer), his engaged reporting a...

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 2092 KB
• Print Length: 400 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 19, 2011)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004FGMD32
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #221,657 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

David K. Shipler

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Former Foreign
Correspondent of The New York Times
Writes online at The Shipler Report, http://shiplerreport.blogspot.com/

Born Dec. 3, 1942. Grew up in Chatham, N.J. Married with three children. Graduated from Dartmouth in 1964. Served in U.S. Navy as officer on a destroyer, 1964-66.

Joined The New York Times as a news clerk in 1966. Promoted to city staff reporter, 1968. Covered housing, poverty, politics. Won awards from the American Political Science Association, the New York Newspaper Guild, and elsewhere.

From 1973-75 served as a New York Times correspondent in Saigon, covering South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Reported also from Burma.

Spent a semester in 1975 at the Russian Institute of Columbia U. studying Russian language and Soviet politics, economics and history to prepare for assignment in Moscow. Correspondent in Moscow Bureau for four years, 1975-79; Moscow Bureau Chief from 1977-79. Wrote the best-seller Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams, published in 1983, updated in 1989, which won the Overseas Press Club Award in 1983 as the best book that year on foreign affairs.

From 1979-84, served as Bureau Chief of The New York Times in Jerusalem. Was co-recipient (with Thomas Friedman) of the 1983 George Polk Award for covering Lebanon War.

Spent a year, 1984-85, as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington to write Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which explores the mutual perceptions and relationships between Arabs and Jews in Israel and the West Bank. The book won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was extensively revised and updated in 2002. Was executive producer, writer and narrator of a two-hour PBS documentary on Arab and Jew, which won a 1990 Dupont-Columbia award for broadcast journalism, and of a one-hour film, Arab and Jew: Return to the Promised Land, which aired on PBS in August 2002.

Served as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in the Washington Bureau of The New York Times until 1988. From 1988-90 was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing on transitions to democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe for The New Yorker and other publications.

His book A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, based on five years of research into stereotyping and interactions across racial lines, was published in 1997. One of three authors invited by President Clinton to participate in his first town meeting on race.

His book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, was a national best-seller in 2004 and 2005. It was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award. It won an Outstanding Book Award from The Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights at Simmons College and led to awards from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, the New York Labor Communications Council, and the D.C. Employment Justice Center. He has written two books on civil liberties, the first published in 2011, The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties and the second, Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America, in 2012.

Shipler has received a Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Award from Dartmouth and the following honorary degrees: Doctor of Letters from Middlebury College and Glassboro State College (N.J.), Doctor of Laws from Birmingham-Southern College, and Master of Arts from Dartmouth College, where he served on the Board of Trustees from 1993 to 2003. Member of the Pulitzer jury for general nonfiction in 2008, chair in 2009. Has taught at Princeton and American University, as writer-in-residence at U. of Southern California, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow on about fifteen campuses, and a Montgomery Fellow and Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth.