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DEFENDING THE DEVIL

MY STORY AS TED BUNDY'S LAST LAWYER

A powerful, moving account of a fledgling lawyer's struggle to stay the execution of serial killer Ted Bundy. As a first-year associate, Nelson blindly accepted a ``little pro bono project.'' She had no idea she was committing the next three years of her life to representing a man who had murdered (approximately) 35 young women. She had no idea that her client, a manic-depressive law school dropout, would repeatedly attempt to sabotage her representation, or that her law firm—Washington DC's white-shoe, politically connected Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering- -``would come to think that [she] had saddled them with this unsavory million-dollar case''; ultimately, they would fire her for her zealous, single-minded advocacy. Nor did she realize that her true opponents in the case would be not the prosecutors but the state and federal courts intent on executing her despised client, no matter what evidence of his insanity she presented. But Nelson's most profound lesson was that she could not focus exclusively on the constitutional issues of Bundy's appeal (such as his incompetence in representing himself, as he had insisted on doing at trial). Somehow, she had to come to grips with the ``absolute misogyny'' of her defendant's bestiality. She had to be able to answer the question posed by every reporter who thrust a microphone in her face: ``What about the victims?'' Nelson quotes liberally from the court record as she recreates the labyrinthine complexity of the death-row appeals process, but you don't have to be a lawyer to appreciate her epiphany as a litigator: ``The best approach is to gladly embrace all the facts, no matter what, and show that every last one of them only reinforce the unassailable correctness of your position''—namely, that capital punishment is murder, and Bundy, executed in 1989, didn't deserve to die. Both a stunningly candid personal story and a fascinating dissection of a misunderstood case. Deserves a wide readership. (First printing of 25,000)

Pub Date: July 21, 1994

ISBN: 0-688-10823-7

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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