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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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