A dense and lawyerly but sometimes illuminating biography.
The improbable making of a brilliant jurist.
Hailing from a German-Jewish family in Elmira, N.Y., Friendly (1903–1986) became a top student at Harvard, editor of the Harvard Law Review, a clerk for Louis Brandeis and one of the few Jews in corporate-law practices on Wall Street. After three decades in private practice, Friendly resolved to change careers. With friends such as Felix Frankfurter and Learned Hand bringing his name to President Eisenhower’s attention, he was nominated and confirmed for the Second Circuit, based in Manhattan, in 1959. Dorsen, counsel to Sedgwick LLP, skates over Friendly’s early years as being solid but undistinguished, and organizes his meticulous biography around the judicial themes that Friendly and his fellow appellate judges took up over the decades: administrative law, securities law, federal court jurisdiction and grand jury procedure. Friendly exploded with writings during his tenure, not only in opinions but speeches and articles, and made an indelible mark on cases involving the Fifth Amendment self-incrimination and double jeopardy clauses, intellectual property and copyright, common law and railroad reorganization. He was highly respected by his fellow judges, and Dorsen writes that Friendly was cited in opinions only second as often as Hand. Fairly conservative, cautious and occasionally creative, Friendly would likely have been a “swing vote” on the Supreme Court today, writes Dorsen, as well as a champion of the Legal Process School. Depressive and prone to eye ailments, he committed suicide at age 82.
A dense and lawyerly but sometimes illuminating biography.Pub Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-674-06439-3
Page Count: 506
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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
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