The celebrated trial lawyer and TV commentator (With Justice for None, 1989, etc.) proves that even a shameless self-publicist can be likeable. This volume recounts the years before Spence gained renown for the Karen Silkwood, Randy Weaver, and other trials. His father, who lived into his 90s, was a lifelong model of decency; Spence's deeply religious mother, however, placed a burden of guilt on the son by committing suicide during his rebellious youth. Like many an autobiographer, Spence finds his childhood more interesting than his readers will, but with adolescence the narrative takes off. That his prose is melodramatic merely seems fitting; Spence's worldview is melodramatic. After a few youthful adventures along brothel-and-merchant-marine lines, he returns to his native Wyoming. While still in college, he meets and marries his first wife. He finds law school easy but the first few years of practicing hard. It will come as a surprise to those familiar with Spence's current social views that he served two terms as a vice-busting county prosecutor and ran for Congress in 1962 as a right-wing Republican; his drubbing in that race turned him to despair, drink, and evidently his famous concern for the ``little guy.'' He recalls with pride his record of vastly increasing jury awards to plaintiffs, but describes with shame his inadequacies as husband and father during those years. In the end, he runs off with his second wife, stops drinking with help from Alcoholics Anonymous, and lives happily ever after, more or less. In an age of self-justification, Spence casts a relentlessly cold eye on his bad behavior as family man, lawyer, and sometime politician. Some readers should, however, find inspiration in Spence's ability to level with himself and still get over his self- loathing, and others will at least enjoy his story. (60 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14673-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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