Though no Gideon’s Trumpet, this is a touch better than the usual run of legal memoirs, and it affords useful insight into...
A noted defense attorney’s unapologetic memoir of a long career in criminal justice.
Granted, even Hitler would be entitled to a jury trial were he a citizen of the United States. Still, Browne has to defend his defense not just of innocent people charged with crimes of various sorts, but also of people he readily calls “monsters who nonetheless still deserved the fair trial our Constitution promises.” Foremost among these monsters was Ted Bundy, who, well before being put to death in 1989, became a byword for murderous depravity. Browne allows that the Bundy case filled him with “disgust and resentment,” but still he did his honor-bound best to defend the serial killer, writing calmly of the calculus that goes into an attorney’s decision about whether a client should be allowed to testify on his or her own behalf—for, courtesy of the Fifth Amendment, we do not have to incriminate ourselves. Bundy did so, largely because, in love with his own narcissism, he believed that he could charm and outsmart the opposing attorneys and judge. He couldn’t. Browne recounts his work in other cases, as well, such as the notorious Wah Mee massacre in Seattle and, a decade afterward, another massacre, this time in Afghanistan and perpetrated—allegedly, of course—by an American soldier so brutalized by war and trauma that he stabbed, shot, and burned some 16 civilians. Browne does not disguise his intentions, though tough-minded readers of a conservative bent will immediately take issue with his insistence that “we the American people made Sergeant Bales”—into, that is, the murderer he was assumed to be—and his belief that the so-called Kandahar Massacre was an appropriate forum to put the war itself on trial.
Though no Gideon’s Trumpet, this is a touch better than the usual run of legal memoirs, and it affords useful insight into the ways of the law and its practitioners.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-487-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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