What do lawyers do all day (and many nights) to earn the big bucks and the ill-favored reputation? Stracher (The Laws of Return, 1996) answers with an animated description of his life as an overworked, overpaid associate in a big New York firm. Ever since lawyering seemed to change from an honored profession to a tough business, the sole object of the game has been billable hours (read “huge fees”). Many firms, particularly the big “white shoe”outfits with major corporate clients, regularly transmute the lives of recently minted lawyers, their associates, into billable hours. Counselor Stracher describes his two years with such a firm (really a composite of several, and representative of many). His own point of view while employed as a biggie was much like that of a hamster on a treadmill: He tells of foolish, wasted, pointless work. But in law, there’s no such thing as too much preparation. And if all-nighters were required, it was usually the associates and paralegals who ate cold pizza into the wee hours—often to support what the author supposed were positions of little merit. Documents, of course, abounded. Lawyer Stracher, in his brief, takes us on a quick tour of the back office, introducing us to quirky colleagues and offering a mini-primer on some black-letter law. Nowhere, though, does he document the unethical practice mentioned in his title. Rather, the mores and manners, foods and fashions of typical swashbuckling lawyers are dissected with skill and humor. Stracher’s heart lies in the writer’s art, not the art of litigation. He’s now an “in-house” litigator with a major network, not—as lawyers joke—an “out-house” attorney in a private firm. A jaundiced but eloquent report on law’s current habits.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-14759-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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