by Bruce Cutler with Lionel Rene Saporta ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2003
Obviously ready for a film or TV treatment: the theatrical mouthpiece is still defending the accused.
A defiant criminal-defense lawyer speaks for himself, though his testimony is largely a fan letter to his favorite client, a man “who’s achieved a certain stature,” the late John Gotti.
Brooklynite Cutler was the devoted son of a onetime cop who became a lawyer for street guys. He too found his calling in the law, first as an assistant D.A. (homicide) and then in practice with media-savvy Barry Slotnik. Through Slotnik he met the Dapper Don. Cutler, quite a natty fellow himself, found a kindred spirit in the charismatic mobster (please insert “alleged” before that word, as the author consistently does). With attention to the press and inborn chutzpah, Cutler soon represented the Don. Never one for research or detailed motions—other lawyers do that—he determined to control the courtroom and everyone in it. He savored the notoriety and excitement even more than the money. The text, light on legal analysis, is filled with characters on both sides of the law. (Treated with particular disdain is Sammy Gravano, never a stand-up gent like Uncle John). Was there ever a Mafia? Cutler thinks it’s a figment of prosecutorial excess and press hysteria. Alternatively, if Cosa Nostra ever did exist, it was simply some street guys with self-destructive lifestyles. Tapes from the Ravenite hangout? Twisted, misconstrued, he says. John’s language was operatic, but he was always blameless, stalwart, and honorable. The crime busters finally jailed Gotti by disqualifying his attorney. Cutler just had to defy a gag order, and thus for a while he wore a 24-hour monitoring bracelet. For all his bluster, he does manage to artlessly deliver the core message from the defense table: just because the government says it’s so doesn’t make it so. Perhaps a little skepticism is sometimes advisable. Anyway, that’s the attitude that walks the clients.
Obviously ready for a film or TV treatment: the theatrical mouthpiece is still defending the accused.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-60831-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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