A split decision, then, though lawyers-in-training and close students of current events should find value in Cochran’s pages.
The most well-known African-American attorney (and perhaps most well-known attorney, period) of our time spins tales of courtroom drama, racism, and the good life.
Many readers, it seems fair to say, will want the answer to just one question: “Did O.J. do it?” Cochran, the captain of O.J. Simpson’s Dream Team, provides a suitably elusive answer in several parts, which boils down to this: Simpson always insisted, in privileged conversations with his attorney, that he didn’t; the jury found Simpson innocent of the charge of murdering his wife because the state did not prove its case beyond any reasonable doubt; a neo-Nazi cop (who, Cochran alleges, though apparently a “reasonably articulate professional, in fact . . . was a lying thug”) was after Simpson for his own reasons. Granted, Cochran writes of the post-verdict Simpson, “it is fair to say that some of the things he’s said and some of the schemes in which he’s gotten involved were probably not as well thought out as they should have been”—well, that’s no reason to torment the guy or suspect him of doing evil. On O.J., though, Cochran offers less meaningful detail than he does on the celebrated cases of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, along with many other less widely reported trials, even though it was l’affaire Simpson that made him a household name—and apparently added greatly to his wealth, even if Cochran has trouble deciding from one page to the next whether he’s rich or merely comfortable. This hurried memoir may frustrate readers seeking insight into Cochran’s inarguably brilliant legal mind, as there is little here on his education, influences, and formative experiences. Still, Cochran does give some accounting of his working methods, which emphasize “preparation, preparation, and then additional preparation.” As well, he ably explores the depth of racism in American society and the consequent difficulty of African Americans and members of other minority groups to find justice. In doing so, Cochran rises to impassioned eloquence—and Americans who do not know firsthand the truth of his arguments may well feel ashamed after reading this.
A split decision, then, though lawyers-in-training and close students of current events should find value in Cochran’s pages.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27826-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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