Search results for ""Author Howard Ball""

"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." —Choice Over the past hundred years, average life expectancy in America has nearly doubled, due largely to scientific and medical advances, but also as a consequence of safer working conditions, a heightened awareness of the importance of diet and health, and other factors. Yet while longevity is celebrated as an achievement in modern civilization, the longer people live, the more likely they are to succumb to chronic, terminal illnesses. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 47 years, with a majority of American deaths attributed to influenza, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or other diseases. In 2000, the average life expectancy was nearly 80 years, and for too many people, these long lifespans included cancer, heart failure, Lou Gehrig’s disease, AIDS, or other fatal illnesses, and with them, came debilitating pain and the loss of a once-full and often independent lifestyle. In this compelling and provocative book, noted legal scholar Howard Ball poses the pressing question: is it appropriate, legally and ethically, for a competent individual to have the liberty to decide how and when to die when faced with a terminal illness? At Liberty to Die charts how, the right of a competent, terminally ill person to die on his or her own terms with the help of a doctor has come deeply embroiled in debates about the relationship between religion, civil liberties, politics, and law in American life. Exploring both the legal rulings and the media frenzies that accompanied the Terry Schiavo case and others like it, Howard Ball contends that despite raging battles in all the states where right to die legislation has been proposed, the opposition to the right to die is intractable in its stance. Combining constitutional analysis, legal history, and current events, Ball surveys the constitutional arguments that have driven the right to die debate.

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While the specificities of individual wars vary, they share a ubiquitous aftermath: the task of finding and identifying the disappeared. The Bosnian war of the early 1990s that destroyed the sovereign state of Yugoslavia is no exception.

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2003 Personal 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 woman who was paralyzed by a gunshot from her mother and who had the plug pulled on herself. For the last half of the twentieth century, the justices of the Supreme Court have had to wrestle with new and difficult life and death questions for them as well as for doctors and their patients, medical ethicists, sociologists, medical practitioners, clergy, philosophers, law makers, and judges. The Supreme Court in the Intimate Lives of Americans offers a look at these issues as they emerged and examines the manner in which the men and women of the U.S. Supreme Court addressed them.

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Taking the Fight South provides a timely and telling reminder of the vigilance democracy requires if racial justice is to be fully realized. Distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball has written dozens of books during his career, including the landmark biography of Thurgood Marshall, A Defiant Life, and the critically acclaimed Murder in Mississippi, chronicling the Mississippi Burning killings. In Taking the Fight South, arguably his most personal book, Ball focuses on six years, from 1976 to 1982, when, against the advice of friends and colleagues in New York, he and his Jewish family moved from the Bronx to Starkville, Mississippi, where he received a tenured position in the political science department at Mississippi State University. For Ball, his wife, Carol, and their three young daughters, the move represented a leap of faith, ultimately illustrating their deep commitment toward racial justice. Ball, with breathtaking historical authority, narrates the experience of his family as Jewish outsiders in Mississippi, an unfamiliar and dangerous landscape contending with the aftermath of the civil rights struggle. Signs and natives greeted them with a humiliating and frightening message: “No Jews, Negroes, etc., or dogs welcome.” From refereeing football games, coaching soccer, and helping young black girls integrate the segregated Girl Scout troops in Starkville, to life-threatening calls from the KKK in the middle of the night, from his work for the ACLU to his arguments in the press and before a congressional committee for the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Ball takes the reader to a precarious time and place in the history of the South. He was briefly an observer but quickly became an activist, confronting white racists stubbornly holding on to a Jim Crow white supremacist past and fighting to create a more diverse, equitable, and just society. Ball’s story is one of an imitable advocate who didn’t just observe as a passive spectator but interrupted injustice. Taking the Fight South will join the list of required books to read about the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of racism in the United States. The book will also appeal to readers interested in Judaism because of its depiction of anti-Semitism directed toward Starkville’s Jewish community, struggling to survive in the heart of the deep and very fundamentalist Protestant South.

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