A fine gag gift for a lawyer of your acquaintance.
Laughs for litigants.
Given the abundant attorney-as-lowest-of-the-low jokes on the market, it’s only natural that someone should have come along to assemble an anthology in which lawyers reveal how bovinely dumb their clients are—and Washington lawyer Liebman, who cut his teeth bringing the awful Spiro Agnew to justice, has done just that. Making no pretension to literary greatness, but pretty nicely done all the same, this collection offers a range of anecdotes on stupid replies to cross-examination (Q: “What happened then?” A: “He told me, he says, ‘I have to kill you because you can identify me’.” Q: “Did he kill you?” A: “No.”), stupid reasons for winding up before a judge, stupid acts on the part of judges and jurors, and karmic paybacks for generally stupid behavior all around. Some of the anecdotes are, refreshingly, even at their narrators’ expense. Most of the contributors have been at the lawyering game for a while—a number of their stories deal with attending law school in the 1960s and wrestling with the clash of hipster idealism and the exigencies of making a buck—and they have a heap of tales to tell, very few of which fall flat. The only downside to the book is the depressing view of the damnable human condition that the anecdotes, as a whole, offer. While it’s no surprise that folks in divorce court can easily revert to the basest behavior and that criminal defendants can come up with some extraordinary rationalizations for their bad faith, some of these tales inspire downright Nietzschean pessimism—but others yield a good yuck or two.
A fine gag gift for a lawyer of your acquaintance.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85728-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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