A must-read for anyone considering law school.
An irreverent lawyer’s memoir.
“The ‘law’ had been passed down in my family like a hideous heirloom,” writes Dorn, who grew up in Washington, D.C. “My dad was a lawyer. My grandfather was a lawyer. Most of my uncles are lawyers. And it wasn’t just my family—most of the people I grew up with also had families full of lawyers.” Though initially reluctant, the author decided to attend law school, with her grandmother willing to pay the tuition. (Dorn repeatedly admits her privilege.) Given that she wouldn’t be buried under law school debt, she committed to becoming a “good lawyer.” The author candidly and wittily shares the details about her experience becoming a lawyer, beginning with the pressures of law school. “When push came to shove,” she writes, “my favorite thing about being at Berkeley Law was telling people that I was at Berkeley Law. No matter how messy my hair was or how socially bizarre I acted, people assumed I had my shit together.” The day after learning she passed the California bar exam, Dorn expresses mixed feelings: “I woke up feeling relieved but also depressed. I was a lawyer now. I was trapped.” As her career progressed and she witnessed the many flaws in the justice system firsthand, her dedication to helping others wavered. She recounts lawyers using elitist terminology and spending little time and effort writing motions, judges shopping online during testimony and drinking in chambers, the system operating differently when the defendant was wealthy, and a culture that catered to “revolting old men” and maintaining the status quo. Dorn soon became jaded and wanted out, seeking escape in writing (her debut novel, Vagablonde, was well received last year). “I’d started to feel that the system was broken beyond repair, and that continued to depress me,” she writes. In the end, she bucked the system and began following her own laws.
A must-read for anyone considering law school.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-306-84652-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
