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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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