This book’s spirituality is a bit thick, but its snazzy legal high jinks make for an entertaining read.
A sublime lawyer tutors two lousy younger attorneys on cutthroat courtroom tactics and spiritual uplift in this legal dramedy.
Mace Spinella and Brick Hawthorne are former door-to-door perfume salesmen, newly minted grads of a Texas law school, and eternally self-pitying losers facing eviction from their Austin apartment. Desperate for rent money, Mace literally chases an ambulance while Brick attempts a slip-and-fall insurance scam, and both schemes fail miserably. Just before they’re arrested for bribery, they get whisked away by an older lawyer with the name of Ike Turner and the look of Kris Kristofferson. Ike is a font of grizzled scorn—“You don’t even deserve the label greenhorn,” he says. “You’re green bananas…junior shysters”—and paternal life-lessons, the latter sometimes delivered in the form of elaborate bets that seem like sure things to the unwary. He tosses Mace and Brick a couple of throwaway cases involving prostitution and drug possession, and he makes the resulting trials a grand seminar in legal procedure, from voir dire to cross-examination (“If you make it look like you’re having to coax it out of him, it makes him look like he’s being less than forthright,” he tells them). But during a trial, Ike teaches that lawyerly ploys are far less important than a deep connection with one’s soul, gained through prayer and breathing techniques (“I inhale flexibility, trust, and freedom. I exhale rigidity, fear, and resistance”). Feazell’s saga is a lively, if ungainly, mix of clashing elements. Crass courtroom maneuvering mixes with earnest therapy-speak: “When pride and willfulness are finally identified and surrendered, true character development and spiritual transformation can take place.” Marijuana is an overbearing presence, conveyed both in the third-person narrative voice—“Scientific studies have shown marijuana is a cure for cancer, and that it helps with Alzheimer’s, autism, Crohn’s disease, glaucoma, migraines, seizures, and even restless leg syndrome, to name a few”—and those of Mace and Brick during their shapeless interludes of stoned palaver. Feazell is a lawyer, and the story comes alive during his fascinating scenes of courtroom strategizing and during his insightful soapboxing on the burdens that the legal system imposes on the poor. Ike, meanwhile, is a charismatic figure that readers will hope to see more of in subsequent installments of the series.
This book’s spirituality is a bit thick, but its snazzy legal high jinks make for an entertaining read.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-97462-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
