Sometimes sophomoric, but intensely insightful.
A Gen-Xer’s satirical memoir takes sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll deep into the bowels of modern law.
If justice is blind, then “The Philadelphia Lawyer” (a mysterious Pennsylvania blogger, true identity unknown) is the pop culture’s new canine guide for the visually impaired. For him, remedial action has as much to do with inhaling nitrous oxide and chasing prostitutes as it does with filing motions. After graduating from law school in Pittsburgh in the late ’90s and settling into Philly (“Shyster Central”), he found the halls of justice chock full of irony and unscrupulous sharks. He took a position in criminal defense, but after watching a defendant get 30 years on a drug-trafficking rap, he realized he didn’t have “the stomach to tolerate the ‘good v. bad’ mythology of that universe.” A process of disillusionment began as he moved from field to field. First civil litigation where, like his colleagues, he surfed Internet porn on the clock, scraping together “billable hours” and charging clients to the nanosecond for phantom casework. Business litigation seemed like the next logical move for our restless narrator. As a new associate under a micromanaging partner, he quickly learned that “wringing profits out of young lawyers is one of the most cynical labor exploitation systems ever invented.” He took a stab at personal-injury work, hoping to hit “that mythical ‘home run’ case, a settlement that would give me enough money to get out of the field for good.” He tried his hand as a legal expert, landing talking-head commentaries on CNN. However, on his second appearance, doing a spot on the Kobe Bryant sex assault case with a migraine hangover, he froze on camera and blew his shot at showbiz. Resigned to some kind of life in law, he launched the increasingly popular and hilarious “Philadelphia Lawyer” blog, which caught the eye of lawyer-turned-fratirist writer Tucker Max, who pushed him into penning this memoir.
Sometimes sophomoric, but intensely insightful.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-134949-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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