An authoritative, impressive assessment of a man whose legal reasoning continues to influence our republic.
A comprehensive biography of an American legal giant.
A lawyer, reformer, Zionist and judge who demonstrated a unique blend of idealism and pragmatism, Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) was an unusual specimen whose career at the bar was every bit as distinguished as his tenure on the bench. From the outset of this detailed study, likely to become the standard biography, Urofsky (Law & Public Policy/Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; Money and Free Speech: Campaign Finance Reform and the Courts, 2005, etc.) confesses the difficulty of getting at the inner life of a man little given to introspection. As a Boston practitioner for nearly 40 years, Brandeis doggedly pursued “all the facts that surround” a case, and his penchant for incorporating sociological and economic materials in his legal arguments created a model later known as a “Brandeis brief.” He pioneered the modern law-office practice, and his pro bono work on behalf of a variety of progressive reforms covering insurance, transportation and utilities earned him the title of the “People’s Attorney.” In 1916, as the first Jew ever nominated to the Supreme Court, Brandeis withstood fierce opposition from conservatives opposed to his liberal views. For the next 23 years he continued to entertain arguments and author opinions attacking the then-prevailing legal classicism that obstructed innovation. Often with his colleague and friend, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brandeis famously dissented in a number of civil-liberties cases, most notably insisting on the right of all Americans “to be let alone.” Urofksy assembles every fact pertinent to Brandeis’s personal and professional life—with a few needlessly repeated—and he’s especially good at placing the Justice in a proper historical and legal context, at explaining Brandeis’s passionate attachment to the Zionist cause and at making complex legal issues comprehensible for the general reader.
An authoritative, impressive assessment of a man whose legal reasoning continues to influence our republic.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42366-6
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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