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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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