A collection of essays with many virtues.
A lawyer offers a series of brief reflections—personal, political, and literary.
Debut author Mayer was a successful attorney—“I made more money than I thought anyone could spend”—but was also inclined to meandering intellectual peregrinations, as evidenced by this eclectic assortment of essays. He covers an extraordinary expanse of meditative territory, discussing by turns matters both personal and philosophical. Many of the chapters—mostly very short and comprised of quick, reflective paragraphs almost aphoristic in their concision—explore the author’s obvious love of literature. A prodigious reader, Mayer opines on Herman Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Céline, and Flannery O’Connor, among many others, and returns more than once to those books that exerted a lasting influence on him, like Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Some of his most trenchant aperçus come in the form of ruminations on his literary favorites: “We cannot solve the problem of suffering because we have fallen. Belief does not insure happiness and perhaps happiness does not even exist at our deeper levels. What does exist in Ms. O’Connor’s world is Grace. Grace is not deserved or demanded—it just is.” Mayer also touches on a host of other diverse subjects, including his career; friends and family; celebrities that apparently interest him; and the vexing nature of partisan politics. In one of the volume’s highlights, “Clarence Darrow as Told by Earl Rogers,” Rogers details his impressive claim to minor fame—the lawyer once defended the legendary attorney Darrow in a jury bribery trial in Los Angeles. Mayer, who is often facetious and wryly ironic, has Rogers voice these fictional claims in the essay: “Darrow would not be in the top one hundred trial lawyers ranked by those who know something about it. I would easily be in the top five and maybe first. Still, you have never heard of me.” The author has a lively and free-ranging mind and writes in lucidly elegant prose: “The question remains, can an immoral person be a genius and leave us something of lasting value? I believe so. A sinner sees things that virtuous people cannot see and genius is a gift from the gods that we best not squander.” The political essays are the least satisfying since they have an axe-grinding partisan bent that’s simply incompatible with either thoughtfulness or rigor: “Modern Conservatives hate the premise that we must be communal to survive and prosper. They see life as violent and a zero sum game.” In addition, the assemblage of essays as a whole has no discernible thematic core, some tonal key to which the parts intelligibly recur, other than the fact that they are all emanations of a single author’s mind. Further, the volume is not a particularly personal memoir, neither an autobiographical chronicle nor an emotional confessional. This compels the question: For whom is this book intended? In fact, given the peripatetic character of the essays and their almost outlinelike brevity, Mayer’s work doesn’t read as if it was envisioned for general consumption.
A collection of essays with many virtues.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 173
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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