Provocative and well told, offering comfort food to both those who believe that trial lawyers are leading the country to...
Intriguing portrait of one of the nation’s leading trial lawyers, and a fine brief on how a certain kind of law is done: slowly, thoroughly, and very expensively.
Now in his mid-60s, David Boies made his first court appearance as a teenager contesting a speeding ticket. His impassioned arguments about what constituted “reasonable and proper speed” won him acquittal, but he was fined all the same for a broken taillight—“his first split decision,” comments legal journalist Donovan. Boies was diligent, intelligent, and apparently born without a sense of irony; his personal statement in his application to Yale Law School began, “I wish to be a lawyer, and the study of law is of course an essential means to this end.” He was so dedicated to his bosses that he paid little attention to life outside the office, which made things difficult for his family. Even so, legal stardom came slowly, finally won when Boies was working as one of two dozen lawyers defending IBM over the course of a 13-year antitrust lawsuit and underscored when he represented the defendant in the complex, politically charged, and widely studied Westmoreland v. CBS, in which the American general sued the network for supposed libel. “One of the myths that grew, over the years, was that Westmoreland surrendered after Boies cross-examined him,” Donovan writes. “But it was . . . Westmoreland’s own lawyer who destroyed the general’s case.” As that passage suggests, the author doesn’t shy from Monday-morning quarterbacking here and there as she examines Boies’s celebrated cases, all characterized by his brilliant argumentation and hard work. Neither of which necessarily guarantees success, as the world learned while watching the legal storm that followed the 2000 presidential election, to which Boies contributed memorable arguments before the Florida bench on the business of indented chads and blocked recounts.
Provocative and well told, offering comfort food to both those who believe that trial lawyers are leading the country to ruin and those who believe they are our salvation.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42113-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
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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