An uneven but rollicking read.
From the 1860s to the first decade of the 20th century, the story of the notorious New York City law firm of Howe & Hummel.
Murphy (Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, 2007) noticed a reference to the firm in Luc Sante’s New York City period history Low Life (1991). Intrigued, the author discovered four 1940s-era New Yorker features about the firm written by Richard Rovere, who collected them in The Magnificent Shysters (1947). Murphy dug deeper, examining court documents and extensive newspaper coverage of their cases. Although the author found very little information about the personal lives of William Howe and Abraham Hummel, she glories in the stark differences between the two men who gained renown during their lifetimes primarily through their immoral tactics in courtrooms. Howe was a flamboyant, obese Catholic. The Jewish Hummel was more understated. Howe tended to defend high-profile murderers, while Hummel focused more on Broadway stars and others involved in civil litigation. Murphy is obviously fascinated by the fact that so many prominent New Yorkers sought out the ethically challenged firm, but, she notes, the lawyers’ questionable reputations might have been a major selling point. “Being rascally was a job recommendation in itself for a Tammany-era lawyer,” she writes; “being rascally and getting away with it was free advertising.” Though full of period color and lively characters, Murphy’s narrative suffers from shifting tones, as the author seems uncertain about whether to approach the lawyers’ exploits using praise, disdain or irony.
An uneven but rollicking read.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-171428-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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