Reviews for When Conscience and Power Meet: A Memoir

The average rating for When Conscience and Power Meet: A Memoir based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-05 00:00:00 Ruth Locke The author is a family friend and contemporary of my parents (he introduced them!), so I am understandably biased.... I found the stories from Senator Zeigler's formative years in a small but growing town in the deep south to be both enlightening and entertaining. Hauntingly familiar people and places come to life through the author's eyes as he comes of age and World War Two looms ahead. When Zeigler returns home after combat service in the Navy, you sense that he sees the inequalities of race and poverty with a clarity from having risked all for liberty and justice, honed by broadened horizons. With his new law degree, he is further exposed to the underbelly of the segregation and subjugation of Jim Crow politics. His conscience cannot abide the status quo, he must confront power, so he undertakes the Sisyphean task of trying to raise social conscience against the gravity of political self-interest. Written with elegance and elan, this memoir deserves to be read when you have time, in the Anglican tradition, to "mark, learn, and inwardly digest."

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-21 00:00:00 Celia Maria C Souza I'm no Johnston fan, but fortunately, Newton explicitly limits his assessment of Johnston to his actions in Virginia leading to his wounding at Seven Pines. He insists that we have to judge Johnston's Virginia campaigns without reference to his later failures in the war. That seems fair, and Newton makes a good case. This is no polemic and no hagiography of Johnston. He offers plenty of criticism of Johnston but also much context. He's even fair to Jefferson Davis. The writing is excellent, well paced and fluent. This volume incidentally serves as an excellent book on the Confederate side of the early Peninsula Campaign, especially the battle of Seven Pines. Surprisingly, the battle - the largest in the East at that time - has had no separate book published except for Newton's own treatment which is out of print and unavailable except at high cost.