An antic case study illuminating how a lawyer is made in frisky prose infused with attitude.
The path from LSAT to license, traced in a coming-of-age, full-of-panic-attacks memoir from a graduate of Columbia Law, class of ’97.
Fresh from the University of Wisconsin, Kimes had the notion that lawyers simply argue. Arriving at New York’s Morningside Heights with a new husband, new hairdo and much trepidation, she joined her fellow bewildered freshmen in their peculiar competition. Each aspiring counselor was a strong character, and hastily formed friendships were as likely to expire as to thrive amid the first-year terror at an institution replete with top-tier Ivy prestige. Kimes describes the fear saturating the lecture halls as cases were dissected in the ancient Socratic way. She coped by maintaining a close relationship with study outlines, casebooks, texts and hornbooks. Preparations for the first set of exams were especially stressful. Happily, things improved for our lawyer-in-training. She nabbed a summer clerkship with a federal judge, the executive editor’s post on Columbia’s transnational law journal (though not the Law Review) and, ultimately, a job at a “Lavish Law Firm.” All that remained was the bar exam. She passed. This edgy, solipsistic narrative will help explain why Ivy League lawyers tend to have a self-reverential sense of entitlement—they picked it up in law school.
An antic case study illuminating how a lawyer is made in frisky prose infused with attitude.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8838-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
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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