Certain to please true-crime and legal-thriller aficionados.
A penetrating examination of the personal tragedy that befell a lawyer defending Jimmy Hoffa.
Tabac (Law/Cleveland State Univ.; The Insanity Defense and the Mad Murderess of Shaker Heights, 2018) unearths a previously untold story. Combining court transcripts, newspaper accounts, books about other figures, and interviews, he reconstructs the little-known life, dramatic career, and untimely death of Zeno Thomas Osborn Jr. In 1962, the Nashville lawyer won Baker v. Carr, the landmark Supreme Court case that established “one man, one vote.” In 1964, Osborn represented Hoffa, the Teamsters boss best remembered for disappearing in 1975 following decades of headlines involving organized crime and federal prosecutions. Tabac places Osborn in the context of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s protracted war with Hoffa and tracks down surviving veterans of its cloak-and-dagger skirmishes. He recounts his own successful 2009 effort to unseal grand jury testimony from the jury tampering trial that destroyed Osborn and reprints the damning transcript of a trickster’s secret recording. He paints Osborn not as a crooked lawyer corrupted by cash but a man who made the mistake of becoming Hoffa’s friend and loyalist. Tabac deftly calibrates his tone as the narrative shifts from Osborn’s Supreme Court victory to the seamy jury tampering episode, borrowing language from soft-boiled fiction: “Partin had clammed up before the grand jurors.” Short chapters maintain a lively pace, and the storytelling is authoritative and tantalizing. Given how vividly Tabac describes private meetings, conversations, and motives, other historians might wish to judge whether he has embellished or misinterpreted sources. His documentation won’t help much; the author provides a bibliography but no footnotes or endnotes. Some in-line references are available books, articles, or transcripts. Many are simply told “to the author.” Nevertheless, he displays balance and objectivity. As historical scholarship, this account may not quite please purists, but Tabac deserves credit for rescuing a forgotten slice of legal history and capturing its inherent drama and enduring lessons.
Certain to please true-crime and legal-thriller aficionados.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4671-3804-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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