An engaging recounting of a life of serious purpose and splendid flair.
One of the most distinguished lawyers of his generation reflects on his life and extraordinary career.
Readers acquainted only with Dershowitz’s TV persona will likely be surprised by the keen sense of humor, the graciousness offered opponents (with a few notable exceptions), and the tenderness toward family, friends and mentors the controversial law professor reveals here. They’ll surely recognize the outsized ego and the passionate, full-throated advocacy of the many and varied legal causes with which he’s so often identified. This memoir opens with an account of his Brooklyn boyhood, his undistinguished high school years, his intellectual awakening at college and his flowering at Yale Law School. After clerking for the legendary Judge David Bazelon and then for Arthur Goldberg on the U.S. Supreme Court, Dershowitz (The Trials of Zion, 2010, etc.) became the youngest full professor ever at Harvard Law School. For more than four decades, he has used this perch to teach, write and speak about the law’s intersections with science and psychiatry and especially about matters pertaining to constitutional and criminal law. Most unusually for a law professor, Dershowitz has maintained a highly active appellate practice, and he narrates the rest of his life in the law through the many cases he’s handled. Many of these unfailingly interesting tales feature high-profile clients like Leona Helmsley, O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson and Bill Clinton. Dershowitz bristles, though, at being labeled merely a celebrity lawyer, and he reminds us of the many obscure defendants whose cases he accepted pro bono due to the important legal questions raised. Best known in recent years as a stout defender of Israel, Dershowitz has become an important voice with an active role in the evolution of American law, touching on an astonishing breadth of issues, including capital punishment, affirmative action, pornography, national security, academic freedom and human rights.
An engaging recounting of a life of serious purpose and splendid flair.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-71927-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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