Lenox Library and The Berkshire Eagle host prize-winning journalist Peter S. Canellos in conversation with editor Priscilla Painton to discuss his new book, "Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement."
May 2 | Lenox Town Hall Auditorium, 6 Walker Street, Lenox, MA | 2:00pm
Lenox Library and The Berkshire Eagle host prize-winning journalist Peter S. Canellos in conversation with editor Priscilla Painton to discuss his new book, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement. It is the first full biography of the Justice who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
Canellos traces the roots of Alito's jurisprudence to his upbringing as the son of an Italian immigrant family who worked their way into the American middle class, only to feel that their values, their patriotism, their Catholicism, their sense of social order, came under sustained assault during the upheavals of the 1960s. Watching Princeton classmates protest during Vietnam, the rise of second-wave feminism, A cultural shift that seemed to devalue everything his family had sacrificed to achieve, shaped Alito's legal thinking. Later the Federalist Society gave Alito and those who shared his grievances both a community and a cause: to dismantle the liberal legal architecture built over the preceding decades.
The book charts how that mission unfolded across a half-century of patient institution-building, culminating in a Supreme Court that has overturned abortion rights, curtailed affirmative action, expanded gun rights, and dramatically reduced the regulatory authority of federal agencies. Canellos poses a pointed question throughout: did the conservative legal movement, in achieving its goals, betray the principles it claimed to defend?
Canellos is the former executive editor of POLITICO and editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a recipient of the George Polk Award and the News Leaders Association Batten Medal for his Supreme Court coverage. His previous book, The Great Dissenter, received wide critical acclaim.
In conversation with Canellos is Priscilla Painton, editor in chief at Simon & Schuster and a former Lenox reporter for The Berkshire Eagle. Books will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of The Bookstore.
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