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
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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