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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
