Criminal lawyers will find plenty of useful trial tips here. Layfolk will simply be mesmerized by this inside-the-courtroom legal primer. The hyperbole of the subtitle aside, Black’s Law is a remarkably down-to-earth, insightful book about the difference one dedicated attorney can make in a criminal-justice system that is deeply flawed. True, Black has represented the elite: he counts William Kennedy Smith and sportscaster Marv Albert among his former clients. But he has also staked much of his legal reputation on people many others would prefer to see rot in jail. “I want you to see the defendant as a flesh-and-blood human being, not a hunk of meat,” writes Black, a former public defender who now appears regularly on CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN. “I want you to feel how he is scared, humiliated, confused and desperate.” Luis Alvarez is a young Miami cop who ignited horrible race riots after he killed a black man he thought was pulling a gun on him. Thomas Knight is an insane multiple killer whose death sentence finally is vacated after Black spends years working to show the many ways in which Knight’s inadequate legal counsel was responsible for never getting him a fair trial or the obvious mental-health treatment that he deserved. Steve Hicks, a bartender with no criminal past until he was charged with murdering his girlfriend, is a disturbing example of the ways in which shoddy police investigative work and circumstantial evidence can ruin a person’s life. The case of Fred De La Mata, a Cuban immigrant bank president, offers a depressing illustration of how overzealous federal prosecutors can dictate the course of a trial. An unsettling page-turner and sobering reminder that in the legal treatment of the least fortunate of our citizenry lie all of our rights. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-81022-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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