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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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