A colorful reminiscence from one of the handful of attorneys, who, when he phones the White House, may be assured of a...
War stories from the professional career of a Washington power lawyer.
Few attorneys can claim a role in as many high-profile cases as Ben-Veniste (co-author: Stonewall: The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution, 1977), who began as a hard-charging prosecutor under the guidance of revered U.S. Attorney Robert Morganthau. In his mid-20s, having already prosecuted a number of Mafia cases, Ben-Veniste headed a corruption investigation that led to the office of House Speaker John McCormack. From there he went to work for the Watergate special prosecutor’s office. After Nixon resigned, Ben-Veniste entered private practice, specializing in criminal law and notably defending an attorney involved in the FBI’s infamous Abscam sting operation which, despite its overly aggressive, questionable tactics, ended up convicting five congressmen, a senator and members of the Philadelphia city council—and Ben-Veniste’s client. His next star turn came as chief counsel to the Democrats for the Senate Whitewater Committee examining the Arkansas land transactions of the Clintons and their business associates. Over a third of this memoir covers his service as a member of the 9/11 Commission, where his most memorable contribution centered on the cross-examination of Condoleezza Rice. Throughout, Ben-Veniste portrays himself as a challenger of authority, a wave-maker determined to ask tough questions and to expose venality and hypocrisy. Readers put off by his near-insufferable self-regard and disingenuous disclaimers of partisanship will, nevertheless, find it hard to resist this gossipy, insider’s account of high-stakes trials and hearings. Whether he’s recounting his repeated attempts to nudge an uncooperative bureaucracy, describing intra-office rivalries, remembering a shady confidential informant from the Abscam case or dishing tidbits about scores of political luminaries, Ben-Veniste fascinates with his tales of legal maneuvering and political bickering among the powerful and famous.
A colorful reminiscence from one of the handful of attorneys, who, when he phones the White House, may be assured of a call-back.Pub Date: May 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-35796-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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