by Andrea D. Lyon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2010
Riveting stories from a persuasive attorney.
Courtroom tales from a DePaul University law professor passionately committed to defending those accused of capital crimes.
Since her first job as a public defender in the mid-’70s, Lyon has tried more than 130 murder cases, all of which demonstrate “the ways in which individuals and institutions can go horribly astray, but…also reveal what remains human and noble in the midst of such waste.” Of the 19 cases that went to the penalty phase, in which the judge or jury decides whether to execute the defendant, Lyon has won all 19. She’s been fired by a woman on trial for her second murder, who many years earlier had smothered her infant daughter—“I sent Jenny to heaven to protect her”—and was now “volunteering” for the death penalty, insisting that all appeals be dropped. Lyon’s characteristic refusal to go along, her insistence that the “defense attorney’s job is not to help deliver the poison,” begins to answer the question she’s faced throughout her career: “How can you defend those people?” In a criminal-justice system that overwhelmingly favors the prosecution and confers enormous advantages according to wealth, race and social status, a rigorous defense, particularly in capital cases, is essential if we hope to entertain any pretense about justice. However, it takes an unusually dedicated, special kind of person to handle these psychologically and emotionally draining cases. Freely detailing her personal life, Lyon explains how she came to this career, tells some amusing/appalling tales about the prejudice she faced early on as a female attorney, stresses the importance of thorough investigation and speaks briefly about her midlife work as an appellate attorney and law-school professor. Without minimizing the horror of her clients’ crimes, the author humanizes each person and reveals the subtext beneath the legalities of any trial that often determines the outcome. Clear-eyed about her role—“In a battle between a witness and a defense lawyer, just assume the jury likes the witness more”—she delivers a strong argument against the wisdom of the death penalty, the sole punishment that forecloses the possibility of redemption.
Riveting stories from a persuasive attorney.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60714-434-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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PERSPECTIVES
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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