Required reading for trial lawyers but also exceptionally informative for anyone interested in legal proceedings.
A book examines the ways in which noted attorneys deploy language to their tactical advantage.
Read (Winning at Deposition, 2012, etc.) heartily subscribes to the notion that the most effective lawyers are gifted storytellers and thus constructs this hefty tome around the power of language in legal settings. For starters, he deserves much credit for expertly curating a project of this magnitude. Each of the seven main sections—Opening Statement, Direct Examination, Cross-Examination, Cross-Examination of the Expert Witness, Closing Argument, Deposition, and Appellate Oral Argument—contains two or three chapters featuring selected attorneys and (as promised in the title) critical moments in illustrative cases. For uninitiated readers, Alan Dershowitz is probably the highest profile figure here, followed by Tom Girardi of Erin Brockovich fame. The range of topics is similarly impressive, from medical malpractice and adoption to SUV safety and the death penalty. The cases studied involve diverse elements, such as the Zapruder film, the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, and the brutal attack on a San Francisco Giants fan in the Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium parking lot. Read is a master of organization and elucidation, guiding readers point by point through the testimony (with crucial phrases highlighted in boldface), with practice tips and notable quotes from the profiled attorney set off in the margins and revisited at the end of each chapter. “Telling the Story with a Reluctant Witness,” a chapter that focuses on Maureen O’Brien’s successful efforts to secure a rape conviction, stands out as a useful example of how Read structures the text for maximum efficiency and impact. In a succinct manner, the author shows readers how to transform leading questions into “specific non-leading questions” and demonstrates the importance of “looping”—“the technique of repeating a portion of the witness’ previous answer into your next question”—in order to reinforce critical information for the jury. He then proceeds to apply these tools by revealing how O’Brien uses them in the courtroom via a well-annotated trial transcript. As an added bonus, Read has created a companion website to house supplemental materials: video, audio, and additional transcripts.
Required reading for trial lawyers but also exceptionally informative for anyone interested in legal proceedings.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9850271-1-7
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Westway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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