A spirited recounting of a highly unusual life in the law.
The founder and chairman of Investigative Group International looks back on a professional career filled with glittering names and important cases.
Lenzner deplores the hyperpartisan tenor of today’s Washington, D.C., where “all that matters is the spin.” Fearful, perhaps, that he’s become too closely identified in recent years with this unseemly scrum due to his investigative work on behalf of the Clintons, he repeatedly assures readers that he’s his own man, interested only in ethically gathering and analyzing facts and dedicated solely to uncovering the truth. Thus, he has monitored anti-war demonstrators on behalf of the Department of Justice and defended peace activist Philip Berrigan; represented the CIA’s notorious “Dr. Death,” Sid Gottlieb, who administered LSD to unwitting subjects; refused to work for Daniel Ellsberg or under Ted Kennedy’s grandiose nephew. Lenzner has investigated the United Way’s shady president, William Aramony, the New Republic’s notorious plagiarist and fabulist, Stephen Glass, and the oil companies who overcharged Alaska for building the pipeline. For pressing his case too forcefully, he’s been fired by Donald Rumsfeld from the Office of Economic Opportunity, as well as by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who let him go when he reported no evidence to support the billionaire’s bizarre theory that the royal family had murdered son Dodi and Princess Diana. Lenzner’s investigations have helped to identify the Unabomber, to recover magician David Copperfield’s equipment confiscated in Russia, and to ease racial tensions in Boston’s housing projects. The author’s best stories emerge from his DOJ work during Freedom Summer and his sleuthing for the Senate Watergate Committee. Mentored by the likes of John Doar, Sam Dash, Robert Morgenthau and Edward Bennett Williams, Lenzner explains how his private practice evolved and how he came to assemble and rely on a cadre of ex-reporters and law enforcement officers to conduct wide-ranging interviews, scour public records and prepare lawsuits based on solid information.
A spirited recounting of a highly unusual life in the law.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16055-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
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