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
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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