Mayer’s industry, his obvious good will and humor persuade even those opposed to his politics or leery of his proposed...
A brief history, a current assessment and, finally, a plea for reform of America’s courts.
Alexander Hamilton was, perhaps, never more wrong than when he characterized the court system as “the least dangerous branch” of the proposed new American government. Over the past 200 years, the courts have emerged to an astonishing extent as the final arbiters of the rights and duties attendant to our democracy. With this authority comes an enormous capacity for mischief. Who are these people who wield such great power, these judges, some 30,000 of them, who handle 92-million cases a year? Mayer (The Fed, 2001, etc.) answers this question and much more, though he has little patience for high flown talk about the rule of law, the role of law or the glories of the adversary system. Instead, he insists on examining the federal, state and county court system as it is: overburdened, understaffed, out-moded and thoroughly unprepared to address the problems of the 21st century. Intended for the general reader, his well-reported, informal narrative identifies our blind adherence to lofty myth and hopeless politicization of the courts as the chief obstacles to reform. Interpolated throughout are chapters devoted to specialty courts that appear to work well—the federal tax court, the so-called “therapy” drug court in Brooklyn, the Colorado water courts—and these vignettes prepare the reader for Mayer’s proposed remedy. No honest observer of our courts at work can wholly approve of them. We are, he argues, long past the time when our disputes ought be handed over to those who owe their robes to political activity. Writing from a frankly disclosed center-left perspective, he insists that we do more to protect the independence of the judiciary, increase efforts to educate and train judges to judge—quite a different thing from training lawyers to advocate—and move increasingly in the direction of problem-solving, specialty courts, familiar with the discourse of other learned professions.
Mayer’s industry, his obvious good will and humor persuade even those opposed to his politics or leery of his proposed solutions that he just might be right.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-28975-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Truman Talley/St. Martin’s
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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