An accessible description of an intricate field of law, examined in an open-hearted style.
A lawyer specializing in family law relates, with appropriate redactions, some unhappy war stories.
Many attorneys avoid cases involving family practice because it’s too emotionally demanding. Others, like Philadelphia lawyer Klaw, are less averse to the family fights, marital mayhem, late-night calls and all the high drama. The author, a wife and mother, deals professionally with such intimate, basic human concerns as love, heirlooms, money, acquisitions, money, sex, children and, of course, money. In daily practice, she may confront lying spouses, secure protection orders, counsel same-sex marriage partners or arrange for new birth certificates for transgendered clients. Family practice, it should be noted, is an evolving legal specialty. There have been titanic social and scientific changes in just a generation or two; evolving sexual mores and relations, as well as new reproductive technology, have outpaced the stately progress of the law. Klaw’s tilt is manifestly feminist, but she acknowledges the camaraderie among family-law practitioners. “We’re joined together through a common work life that can be difficult, emotionally intense, sometimes exhilarating, and sometimes thankless,” she writes. All lawyers, of course, enjoy reprising their courtroom adventures and recounting what they think are interesting “matters” (cases); Klaw, a regular blogger, is quite adept at anecdotal exposition of legal principles. Especially effective is her analysis, running sporadically throughout the book, of a representative custody trial. The conversational, entertaining text may sometimes sound more like Judge Judy than Learned Hand or Felix Frankfurter, but it is all informative and smart. (It may also enhance her total of well-deserved billable hours).
An accessible description of an intricate field of law, examined in an open-hearted style.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-239-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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 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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