Will appeal to those familiar with the legal arena, but the machinations of criminal defense may go over the heads of many...
A seasoned New York City criminal-defense attorney juxtaposes life defending hardened criminals with caring for her inquisitive daughters.
Though outspoken and diligent in her work, Trupp admits that she is quick to cry. She wept her way through middling grades in college, defeats in court and difficult pregnancies, but her greatest challenges, she says, have come from defending extremely demanding legal cases then changing hats and returning home to devote time to her family. Trupp revisits some of her more controversial cases, beginning with the complex trial of alleged cop killer Stephen DeLuca. After that defeat, she became overwhelmed with a second maternity leave and the “mommy justice” she was required to hand down at home. Ice-cream socials, bake sales, puppies and bedtime stories run parallel with a female murder plot, a vicious stabbing incident and unsettling visits to Rikers Island Correctional Facility to review a prison gang-rape scenario. Trupp also sprinkles in stories of her childhood, early life lessons and times at home with husband Charlie, also an attorney. Employing raw, often unchecked emotional language, the author’s intricate balancing act creates sympathy simply for its stark laboriousness. Though the criminals she steadfastly defends are thiefs, rapists and murderers, Trupp discusses how she has learned important lessons and found enrichment from her interactions with them.
Will appeal to those familiar with the legal arena, but the machinations of criminal defense may go over the heads of many working moms.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59486-824-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
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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
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