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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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