An impressively thorough introduction to the basic elements of nonprofit law.
A veteran nonprofit lawyer reflects on his career and the fundamentals of his profession.
Hopkins (Starting and Managing a Nonprofit Organization, 2017, etc.) often encounters bewilderment when he informs people he’s a nonprofit lawyer, and so it makes sense he would write a book explaining what precisely that means. The author is inarguably an expert on the topic, having practiced law for nearly 50 years, a wealth of experience chronicled in the portion of the volume devoted to autobiographical remembrance. After a year attending Flint Junior College in Michigan and a stint working in Washington, D.C., he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he majored in political science (he wishes he chose English literature in hindsight). He graduated in 1964 and subsequently earned a degree in law from the George Washington University School of Law in 1967. Hopkins completed a master’s degree in tax law from the same institution and began teaching university courses and ultimately became a professor at the University of Kansas Law School in 2015, finishing a doctorate there. His work experience at seven law firms is also cataloged in great detail. But the bulk of the book is devoted to an exhaustive account of the fundamentals of nonprofit tax law and practice—the last section describes the 150 most fundamental elements. The author’s unfailingly lucid study seems designed for someone considering a career as a nonprofit lawyer—it’s unclear who else would benefit from such a comprehensive overview. The volume as a whole is charmingly, if eccentrically, eclectic—Hopkins combines a surprisingly candid memoir with an encyclopedic primer on nonprofit law. He expresses himself in a breezy, curmudgeonly style—he bristles at the conflation of lawyer with attorney and the use of “not-for-profit” in place of nonprofit. Most importantly, the author is a natural teacher and a seasoned writer, and as a result, his overview of the subject is likely as good if not better than any other available. He even supplies a thoughtful account of the political philosophy that undergirds the creation of tax exemption.
An impressively thorough introduction to the basic elements of nonprofit law.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-5220-1
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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