Overlong but well-balanced.
Veteran journalist Wilkie (Journalism/Univ. of Mississippi; Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events that Shaped the Modern South, 2001, etc.) produces a meaty biography extolling the rise and fall of an infamously lucrative trial litigator.
A 1976 graduate of the University of Mississippi Law School and former Navy pilot, Richard “Dickie” Scruggs’ early career as a lawyer was jumpstarted when he began representing shipyard workers from his Pascagoula hometown who were diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer. The ensuing lawsuits against the culprits, asbestos manufacturers, netted both the claimants and Scruggs millions in the ’80s. Fueled by cooperative whistleblowers and what he felt was a “lack of government regulation” on issues like tobacco, chemicals, physicians’ malpractice and substandard automobile design, Scruggs became a hubris-laden champion to the “powerless masses,” while concurrently becoming the target of angry politicians and corporate brass who lost constituents and corporate revenue. His co-involvement in prosecuting an array of tobacco companies “gave him an annual income projected at $20 million over a twenty-five-year period.” Scruggs went on to successfully tackle insurance companies who denied claims in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. However, he also cultivated and heavily financed shady associations with state auditors and professional partnerships. His marriage to Diane Thompson, sister to the wife of republican Sen. Trent Lott, afforded Scruggs a familial alliance that would become elemental as political overlords began zeroing in on his increasingly hushed activities. These peripheral pressures may have accounted for the attorney’s lack of proper judgment when his law firm was indicted and convicted of the bribery of a Mississippi state court judge twice, once in 2007 and again in 2009. Using data from print media, court transcripts, interviews, family meetings and from a particularly hard-won discussion with Scruggs’ son and junior law partner, Zach, Wilkie charts his subject’s serpentine legal and political machinations with dense, rich prose. While he honestly considers Scruggs “a friend,” his chronicle is even-keeled and unbiased.
Overlong but well-balanced.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46070-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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