Search results for ""Author Thane Rosenbaum""

"Fans of the greater Miami megalopolis rejoice! Finally there's a novel that nails your part of the world!" —Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story"It's hard to resist raising a toast to a book that shows Meyer Lansky, Frank Sinatra, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Muhammad Ali at a Little League Baseball game umpired by Fidel Castro. As Gleason would say, "And awaaaay we go!" —The Washington PostSet in Miami Beach in 1972, this novel follows the Posner family—two Holocaust survivors, Sophie and Jacob, and their son, Adam—doing everything they can to avoid one another in a city with an infinite supply of colorful diversions. In '72 Miami hosted both the Republican and Democratic political conventions and experienced the rise of the counterculture, the Cold War, and the desegregation of the old South. Miami Beach was to be the Posner's salvation. Instead they discover their lives quickly turning into a Disney World of funhouse mirrors and chaotic rides that give them front row seats through a transformational year in American culture, politics, and history.Thane Rosenbaum, author of the novels The Stranger Within Sarah Stein, The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, and Elijah Visible (winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award), is a Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture, and Society.

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We call it justice - the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the incarceration of corrupt politicians or financiers like Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff, and the climactic slaying of cinema-screen villains by superheroes. But could we not also call it revenge? We are told that revenge is uncivilized and immoral, an impulse that individuals and societies should actively repress and replace with the order and codes of courtroom justice. What, if anything, distinguishes punishment at the hands of the government from a victim's individual desire for retribution? Are vengeance and justice really so very different? No, answers legal scholar and novelist Thane Rosenbaum in Payback-revenge is, in fact, indistinguishable from justice. Revenge, Rosenbaum argues, is not the problem. It is, in fact, a perfectly healthy emotion. Instead, the problem is the inadequacy of lawful outlets through which to express it. He mounts a case for legal systems to punish the guilty commensurate with their crimes as part of a societal moral duty to satisfy the needs of victims to feel avenged. Indeed, the legal system would better serve the public if it gave victims the sense that vengeance was being done on their behalf. Drawing on a wide range of support, from recent studies in behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics, to stories of vengeance and justice denied, to revenge practices from around the world, to the way in which revenge tales have permeated popular culture - including "Hamlet", "The Godfather", and "Braveheart" - Rosenbaum demonstrates that vengeance needs to be more openly and honestly discussed and lawfully practiced. Fiercely argued and highly engaging, "Payback" is a provocative and eye-opening cultural tour of revenge and its rewards - from Shakespeare to "The Sopranos". Rosenbaum liberates revenge from its social stigma and proves that vengeance is indeed ours, a perfectly human and acceptable response to moral injury.

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