In a vivid, thoughtfully enthusiastic critique, Langum (Law/Samford Univ.; Crossing the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act, 1994) outlines the life, loves, and legal struggles of the radical lawyer who defended such diverse clients as the Chicago Seven, the Attica prison insurgents, Jack Ruby, and John Gotti. Langum, a libertarian though not a radical, admires Kunstler for “his willingness to do battle against the government” at a time when the author perceives an increasing threat to individual liberty from the growing power of the federal government. However, Kunstler emerges here as a protean figure whose personality and legal philosophy defy easy classification. As Langum shows, commencing with his representation of members of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, Kunstler identified with the New Left and indeed often represented political radicals. Also, Kunstler would frequently politicize the causes of his indigent and minority clients, articulating ideological legal defenses intended more to expose the hollowness of the judicial system and to point up societal issues like racism than to obtain acquittal for his clients. Still, as Langum shows, Kunstler carried on a conventional law practice for many years and represented many nonideological clients, including mob figures, and despite his radical contempt for judges, colleagues, and the conventions of the bar and bench, usually conducted himself in the courtroom with exemplary professionalism and decorum. Langum sketches Kunstler’s complex, appealing personality and details his love of writing, his two marriages, and his womanizing habits. Langum also analyzes several of Kunstler’s important trials and describes his sometimes off-the-cuff trial preparation and technique, his prodigious work ethic, and the effect of his affable personality and outsized ego on clients, judges, and adversaries. While conceding that Kunstler was no saint, Langum concludes that, to combat the growing despotism of the federal government, “thousands of Kunstlers are needed.” An absorbing, reflective narrative of the life and crusades of America’s quintessential “people’s lawyer.” (16 photos)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8147-5150-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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