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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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