Acknowledging the balance between her heart and head, Ridha amply demonstrates what can happen when the balance is upset.
Defending the son of a famous actor, a defense attorney finds herself entangled in the case emotionally as well as legally.
Ridha’s defense of Cameron Douglas, son of Michael, came at a unique, distinct point in her career as a defense attorney. She had been in practice long enough to understand the risks inherent in defending a charming, handsome addict in a federal trafficking case. At the same time, she had not been in practice long enough to be able to have that understanding inform her every action; she wasn’t inured to the possibility that she could go down the wrong path and not stop. Cameron was the third actor in the family, after grandfather Kirk and father Michael, and his family pressed to have him moved somewhere safer than the maximum security prison in which he awaited trial. They reasoned that since he was cooperating with the investigation, he was in danger; if that news spread, his fellow inmates would likely tear him apart. He was also being denied medication deemed essential by his psychiatrist. During the case, Ridha realized that she was becoming emotionally involved, but she was not able to resist crossing the line when the system was being unjust. Feeling that she was protecting her client, she smuggled his medication into the prison. As the title of the book makes clear, Ridha was caught and prosecuted. Her hindsight provides some stinging and insightful commentary on how she allowed this to unfold (“the law has no basis in science, it does not fully correspond to even the most basic moral code”), though the prose occasionally veers into hyperbole when she writes about how she fell for Cameron.
Acknowledging the balance between her heart and head, Ridha amply demonstrates what can happen when the balance is upset.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8572-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
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