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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
