Engagingly, Newsweek Washington bureau-chief Thomas tells the colorful story of the controversial criminal lawyer who defended spies, mobsters, demagogues, and even industrialists from legal punishment, but who left moral judgments to the ``majestic vengeance of God.'' In many ways, Williams's career was unique. He was a respectable Washington insider whose access to the secrets of the powerful gave him a reputation as a ``fixer'' of legal difficulties, yet he was a criminal lawyer who willingly defended thugs, Mafia dons, and pornographers and lived a fast life among athletes and other celebrities in bars and nightclubs. Although a devout Catholic who attended mass daily, Williams emerges in Thomas's account as an amiable, morally ambivalent rogue who thrived on power. Thomas portrays Williams as an aggressive competitor at the game of litigation who would defend anyone ``as long as they gave him total control of the case and paid up front,'' and for whom defeat was unacceptable. The author shows that Williams was genuinely brilliant as a lawyer—for instance, his successful defense of Jimmy Hoffa, in what initially seemed an unwinnable case, was a stunning display of legal virtuosity. Gradually, Williams's clients became wealthier, and Williams became one of the first, and most celebrated, specialists in ``white collar'' crime. Armand Hammer, Marvin Mandel, John Connally, and Robert Strauss numbered among his clients. Williams became so wealthy from his practice that, among other investments, he eventually became owner of the Washington Redskins and the Baltimore Orioles. Liver cancer, which struck in January 1987 and eventually killed him, prevented him from accepting an offer from President Reagan to helm the CIA. A skillful and lively portrait of a larger-than-life lawyer. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-68934-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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
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