From Library Journal
A principal public monument in Budapest, Hungary, and a monument to Confederate dead in Austin, TX, provide departure points for an extended essay by Levinson (law, Univ. of Texas). Levinson rambles through semiotic issues around the ideological use of public commemorations as devices of political-cultural discourse. The Confederate flag, highway and battlefield names, holidays, social heroes, and a selection of stone monuments are stirred indiscriminately into the mix, with the monuments mostly providing random points of departure for Levinson's meditations. This book is a personal reflection on the role of public art within the social order but is not written well enough to bring together its seemingly disparate parts. What results is a book for the reader interested in the hermeneutics of culture, "museumization" of history, and social cleavage, longer on reveries than analysis. An optional purchase.?Scott Hightower, New York Univ./Gallatin, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"[W]ell-written, thought-provoking. . . . A legal scholar, Levinson quite naturally turns to the law for answers. His discussions of whether the Constitution (specifically the First and Fourteenth amendments) ‘speaks with enough clarity to invalidate the display of the Confederate battle flag or the raising of certain monuments’ is painstaking, yet clear enough for the average non-lawyer to read. And his conclusion, that the courts are (or should be) ‘quite limited in their actual power when what is at stake is the politics of cultural meaning,’ seems to me to be the right one." - The Washington Post
"In Written in Stone, Sanford Levinson suggests that rather than addressing the greatest challenge facing our multicultural society—namely, how to fashion ‘unum out of the pluribus of American society’—our efforts at achieving reconciliation seem to have produced increasingly polarized pockets of unums." - The American Prospect
“In Written in Stone, Levinson bravely confronts another article of constitutional faith, freedom of speech. Instead of the conventional examination of an individual’s right to speak without the interference from government, however, he looks at what protections the Bill of Rights provides for government-sanctioned speech.” - Peter Blake, Times Literary Supplement
“A profound and engrossing meditation on historical memory and national commemoration. It is so skillfully composed and illustrated with such striking examples that I read it in a single sitting, like a murder mystery—except that the question here is not ‘who done it’ but ‘how do we reckon with what was done?’”—Michael Walzer, author of On Toleration
“Much has been written about the controversy over public presentations of history, but rarely has the question of how to memorialize our past received the thoughtful, incisive, and fair-minded analysis provided by Sanford Levinson.”—Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom
“Sanford Levinson has written a wonderfully wise and informed essay on the issue of how we commemorate the past when the past keeps on changing.”—Nathan Glazer, author of We Are All Multiculturalists Now
“This remarkable book addresses an issue as old as civilization and as topical as this morning’s newspaper. No reader of Levinson’s cultivated, nuanced, and balanced narrative will ever view a public monument in quite the same way.”—Norman Dorsen; President, ACLU, 1976–1991
