The celebrated trial lawyer and TV commentator (With Justice for None, 1989, etc.) proves that even a shameless self-publicist can be likeable. This volume recounts the years before Spence gained renown for the Karen Silkwood, Randy Weaver, and other trials. His father, who lived into his 90s, was a lifelong model of decency; Spence's deeply religious mother, however, placed a burden of guilt on the son by committing suicide during his rebellious youth. Like many an autobiographer, Spence finds his childhood more interesting than his readers will, but with adolescence the narrative takes off. That his prose is melodramatic merely seems fitting; Spence's worldview is melodramatic. After a few youthful adventures along brothel-and-merchant-marine lines, he returns to his native Wyoming. While still in college, he meets and marries his first wife. He finds law school easy but the first few years of practicing hard. It will come as a surprise to those familiar with Spence's current social views that he served two terms as a vice-busting county prosecutor and ran for Congress in 1962 as a right-wing Republican; his drubbing in that race turned him to despair, drink, and evidently his famous concern for the ``little guy.'' He recalls with pride his record of vastly increasing jury awards to plaintiffs, but describes with shame his inadequacies as husband and father during those years. In the end, he runs off with his second wife, stops drinking with help from Alcoholics Anonymous, and lives happily ever after, more or less. In an age of self-justification, Spence casts a relentlessly cold eye on his bad behavior as family man, lawyer, and sometime politician. Some readers should, however, find inspiration in Spence's ability to level with himself and still get over his self- loathing, and others will at least enjoy his story. (60 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14673-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
