A perceptive, witty memoir of the lawyering life, by one of the most prestigious members of the New York bar. The law career of the late Arthur Liman (he died last year) spanned four decades and included some of the most interesting cases of the late 20th century: he became an attorney after observing Senator McCarthy’s contempt for legal freedoms in the 1950s, and by the late 1980s his clients included William Paley of CBS and junk-bond guru Michael Milken. The book is spiced with personal anecdotes about some of his dealings with the famous and the infamous. Some, like media mogul Steve Ross (who negotiated the Time-Warner merger), come across as decent, almost humble, folks. Others are not spared Liman’s well-developed wrath toward any who would abuse the legal system: the book closes with Liman’s notes from the Iran-Contra investigation (of which he was chief legal counsel for the Senate), in which he castigates the circumvention of the Constitution by key White House and CIA officials. In particular, he never believed that Admiral Poindexter authorized all of the illegal activities without President Reagan’s knowledge (unfortunately, Liman’s private comment during a recess that Poindexter’s testimony was —bullshit— was picked up by a microphone and broadcast on TV). Liman also reflects on the investigators— poor decisions, which unwittingly created a national hero out of Oliver North, who ’symbolized contempt for Congress.— Always, Liman is quick to point out why Iran-Contra differed from Whitewater, Watergate, and other high-profile scandals: the issue at stake was whether the executive branch could ignore Congress by creating an unaccountable, secret organization that would conduct covert foreign policy and decide on matters of national security. Only rarely succumbing to legalese, Liman’s book is an important reminder of the foundations of constitutional law and offers a fine example of one attorney’s integrity. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-891620-04-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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