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
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
