This is a story all young men and women should read...it is truly the story of "the American Dream" come to life...it demonstrates what tenacity and chutzpah can accomplish in the very competetive fashion world.
I'm fortunate enough to own several of Mr. Hankins' designs, and knowing the story behind the clothing is wonderful.
I was very pleased with this book.

This book is outstanding! I reccomend this book to anyone who can get their hands on it. It is a true story of hard work, determination, strongness, and much more. This book is written in such a way that you feel as if you know Anthony Mark Hankins personally. I loved it!

In response to Kirkus Reviews, why wouldn't consumers want to know about a designer of such determination and talent? It's like your saying because AMH is young and not yet as common a household name as Calvin Klein that his life and accomplishments don't deserve recognition. His story has given many aspiring designers, myself included the confidence to reach for their dreams.

This book on pathology of inflammatory skin diseases is quite different than anything else in the field. Ackerman presents his own opinions boldly and interestingly. Have I had a book like this during my residency, I would have probably gotten more involved in this subject. At that time the book to read was Lever: the result was profound sleepiness and inability to finish a chapter. Here it is all different: each small chapter is thought provoking and original. Finally skin pathology became interesting!

simply the best!!

Continuing from Foundations, Ackerman has proven deep ties to traditional majoritarianism. However, I find his spin fascinating, albeit not the juiciest read I've come across recently. His take on our democratic history is refreshing, and I recommend it to those who crave exposure to new vantage points of American tradition.

Bruce Ackerman eloquently uses the "higher lawmaking" theory just as Adam Smith used his invisible hand. Instead of guiding the American economic system and gross national product, Ackerman's higher lawmaking theory provides that the American ratification of the Constitution of the United States is led by things other than the system of ratification provided for us in Article V of the Constitution.

Ackerman proposes, and quite well, that ratification is not only led by the institutions of America, but We the People as well. Although I am far from being a "hypertexualist" in Ackerman's sense of the word, I do believe that the framers intended Article V of the Constitution to speak as a mandate for the people.

If Roosevelt in the 1930's was so concerned about hearing the mandate of We the People, why couldn't he have adhered to the Article V process even after the Supreme Court had bowed in defeat to laissez-faire in 1937? Was Roosevelt afraid that his New Deal would not make it through the formalistic Article V process? Roosevelt already had an unprecedented control over the Senate and the House, not to mention congressional election results of 46 of the 48 states in 1936. What was his fear in taking the path of amendment ratification?

Ackerman tackles these speculations and others in We the People. I strongly recommend this book for lawyers or the constitutionally inquisitive student.

It was winter; the ants' store of grain had gotten wet and they were laying it out to dry. A hungry cicada asked them for something to eat. "Why didn't you gather food in the summer, like us?" one of the worker ants asked. "I didn't have time," it replied; "I was busy making sweet music." The worker laughed at it. "Very well," it said; "since you sang in the summer, you must dance in the winter."

A few ants of the drone caste heard what the worker said and were morally outraged. They convinced their brother drones to force the colony to share its grain with the cicada and all its relatives. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," they said. For several years the drones ran the colony in the new, moral, way. The cicadas and the ants all nearly starved to death. Equally.

The drones of another colony, who agreed with the moral claim of the cicadas, pondered the sad fate of first colony. "The worker was right; the cicada made its own choices and had no moral claim on the ants' store of grain," they said. "But not everyone gets a fair start. To fix this, we will give everyone a share of the grain at the beginning of the summer, not at the end. Then at the end of the summer everyone will pay back the share he or she got at the beginning, plus interest. And those who do well and have extra grain will pay back extra to make up for those who don't have enough."

The cicadas thought this was a great idea. The workers weren't so sure. All that summer, the cicadas sang sweetly, the workers gathered grain (but not too much since they knew they'd have to give away any extra), and the drones watched. That winter they all nearly starved to death. Equally.

In an outstanding new book called the Stake holder society, Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott propose having the government give every American $80,000 in their early twenties. This would be funded by a two percent tax on wealth above $80,000. They also suggest a privilege tax on those who have had financially privileged childhoods. These proposals are carefully thought out and well motivated by the idea of giving some substance to our common empty talk of "equality of opportunity."

Ackerman and Alstott dismiss a number of other approaches, such as funding education better or raising minimum wages as too small and/or actually harmful and/or politically difficult. Unhappily, I'm inclined to think that their proposals are just as politically difficult.

And I have a quibble with the digs scattered through this book against "utilitarians," who are never named. As in all American ethical arguments, the example used is that of Nazi Germany, where Jews were one percent of the population. "[I]s it so clear," the authors ask, "that the average Jew suffered NINETY-NINE times as much as the average Aryan gained from his feelings of racial superiority?"

One response to this is that feelings like those often involve hatred, which, being unpleasant, is not a gain at all. But, even accepting that there was a gain for many racists, the trade-off is not necessary. The racists could have felt superior without killing anyone, an action which, if completed, would have deprived them of the allegedly beneficial presence of people they perceived as inferiors.

More importantly, these numbers (one and ninety-nine units of pleasure or suffering) do not mean anything. We could give a vivid description of the concentration camps and then ask "Isn't it abundantly clear that the average Jew suffered at least ninety-nine times as much as the average Aryan gained from his feelings of racial superiority?" The case for this "calculation" is exactly as good as for its opposite.

The value of utilitarianism lies not in calculations (calculations which Ackerman and Alstott accept while trying to dismiss) but in placing the well-being of people above adherence to any rule. Utilitarianism ought to be an ally of anyone who recognizes the harm done by devotion to certain rights and freedoms, such as the freedom to engage in unfair and cruel labor practices, the "right to work", and the faith that people have what they "deserve."

And don't get me started on the way readers of Foucault tend to characterize Bentham...

I've encountered two arguments against the Stake holder society. The first, which is well addressed in the book, is that some people would waste their $80,000. I agree with the authors that relatively few would waste their money, and that many would be much better off than they are now. I find that people who make this criticism are not themselves suggesting an alternative remedy to the drastic disparity in wealth in America, and are not even aware of it. In many cases, they profess a belief that there is no hunger in this country, that people only suffer if they don't work, and that everyone has a chance to make it.

The second argument I've encountered is that charity must be done "privately," that is, without the government. In some cases, advocates of private charity support huge organizations known for as much corruption and inefficiency as any government, real or imagined. In other cases, they support only one-on-one charity without any intervening (or skilled, organized, or powerful) agency. Often in supporting these charities, government -haters make clear that they do know that hunger exists in America, if not that people working 60 hours a week can qualify for food stamps (temporarily, of course).

Sometimes supporters of private charity argue that the way to help is to teach entrepreneurism, apparently oblivious to the pertinent absence of capital. Other times they argue for simply giving fish instead of fishing skills. After all, this is good for the giver, and the poor will always be with us.

Why do private and public charity need to be in conflict? I give some tiny amounts to organizations and to people I meet on the street, and I simultaneously argue for living wage laws, campaign finance reform, an end to corporate welfare and waste on weapons, spies, highways, and subsidies for cutters of national forests. I will now argue for a Stake holder society without feeling any conflict with dropping some canned food in a basket or helping build Habitat for Humanity houses.

If private charity were doing the job, no one would propose government charity (and vice versa). And a lot of what is proposed amounts to government neutrality. Many of our taxes are regressive. Our services are unevenly distributed, notably in education. And we have the money. Just yesterday (May 6, 1999) we threw an extra $13 billion at the Pentagon. That kind of money could end many debates over education by providing better schools in poor counties and cities. Our cities routinely give huge tax-breaks to companies that move to certain areas promising jobs that no one ever bothers to make sure are actually provided. These funds could be better spent.

And isn't it important that the top one percent of wealthy people in the U.S. could end poverty and still live like emperors? Need I be selfish and hypocritical and out-of-line to mention this fact. I don't think so. I cannot myself reach into my pocket and end poverty. I would if I could. By all means, let's have lots of private charity and local assistance. But let's think bigger than that too.

The idea at first sounds crazy, but trying to figure out why will force you to examine many of your own opinions--and perhaps ultimately to reach a different conclusion than your first.

This title is a good introduction to the underlying economic considerations that are relevant to common law property principles (e.g., the free rider problem). It was used in my first year property law class in law school and I found it very helpful in understanding important concepts underlying the black letter law.

Something's missing from this book. Maybe it's that Ackerman is not as incandescently deceptive .... No, Ackerman is not so fine a worker with the constitution. It's more like he's rummaging around in the cupboard, making a lot of noise about historical debates here and there, and big supreme court decisions that do or don't bear out some preferred value. By the middle of the book, you cease to care, and just wish he'd stop making noise. .... In summary, this is an example of what the Crits refer to as a "hard book" ....

At times our constitutional jurisprudence has fundamentally changed without a constitutional amendment. Bruce Ackerman tries to expalin this. He offers the theory of a constitutional moment that occurs when the public makes it clear that it is time for a new constitutional way. The problem is that only Ackerman knows when that moment occurs. This arrogance does violence to serious and meaningful constitutional interpretation

Ackerman describes historically how we arrived at our current Constitutional jurisprudence. He compares the original Constitution with the changes arising out of Reconstruction and then out of the New Deal--emphasizing that those changes cannot be adequately described within the formal Article V ammendment process. We might wish history had gone otherwise--I know I often do--but he gives a framework to at least understand it.

This book is a major step forward in recogizing that the fundemental structures of American Constitutional law require both sound analytical models as well as rich historical context.

This is one of the handful of most thought-provoking and persuasive books I have read on the Constitutional process.

I read this book for a college thesis I researched and wrote. The legal arguments presented are enough to make you either: 1) laugh uncontrollably, 2) roll your eyes repeatedly, 3) thank God that Bush won, and 4) lose some sleep knowing these legal scholars are brain-washing American students. The only Supreme Court that circumvented the law was the FLORIDA Supreme Court. This book points the finger at the wrong group.