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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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