A welcome contribution to legal and judicial history.
Cogent biography, at once admiring and damning, that amplifies and corrects the record left by the controversial Supreme Court justice in his memoirs.
Much in that record was true, writes Murphy (Civil Rights/Lafayette Coll.). Yes, rural Washington–bred William O. Douglas (1898–1981) arrived at Columbia Law School smelling of sheep. Indeed, Douglas’s apparently unassuming demeanor concealed a brilliant legal mind. He really did prefer the forest to the city and, it sometimes seemed, animals to people. His qualities took him far. Douglas had to scramble at first to compete with the children of privilege in Wall Street law firms and the corridors of the Ivy League, but he quickly made a name for himself as a legal scholar. He attained even greater recognition when he gave up a Yale professorship at the height of the Depression to take over the new Securities and Exchange Commission and ride herd over corporate America. Appointed to the Court by FDR in 1939, Douglas served on the bench for 36 years, attracting a legion of enemies and surviving four impeachment campaigns, at least one orchestrated by his nemesis, Richard Nixon. Douglas minimized his political skills in the autobiographies Of Men and Mountains (1950) and Go East, Young Man (1974), and Murphy’s chronicle is most valuable in showing how he adeptly played his own version of hardball to retain position and power. Though a liberal saint, the justice was evidently not a very nice man, especially when it came to crediting others for their help. Although an indifferent writer given to clichés (“the atmosphere in the school became palpably electric”), Murphy is a careful researcher; his portrait of Douglas is both thorough and critical. Dark side notwithstanding, Douglas emerges from these pages as a far better jurist and citizen than most of the justices who have followed him.
A welcome contribution to legal and judicial history.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-394-57628-4
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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