A fine gag gift for a lawyer of your acquaintance.
Laughs for litigants.
Given the abundant attorney-as-lowest-of-the-low jokes on the market, it’s only natural that someone should have come along to assemble an anthology in which lawyers reveal how bovinely dumb their clients are—and Washington lawyer Liebman, who cut his teeth bringing the awful Spiro Agnew to justice, has done just that. Making no pretension to literary greatness, but pretty nicely done all the same, this collection offers a range of anecdotes on stupid replies to cross-examination (Q: “What happened then?” A: “He told me, he says, ‘I have to kill you because you can identify me’.” Q: “Did he kill you?” A: “No.”), stupid reasons for winding up before a judge, stupid acts on the part of judges and jurors, and karmic paybacks for generally stupid behavior all around. Some of the anecdotes are, refreshingly, even at their narrators’ expense. Most of the contributors have been at the lawyering game for a while—a number of their stories deal with attending law school in the 1960s and wrestling with the clash of hipster idealism and the exigencies of making a buck—and they have a heap of tales to tell, very few of which fall flat. The only downside to the book is the depressing view of the damnable human condition that the anecdotes, as a whole, offer. While it’s no surprise that folks in divorce court can easily revert to the basest behavior and that criminal defendants can come up with some extraordinary rationalizations for their bad faith, some of these tales inspire downright Nietzschean pessimism—but others yield a good yuck or two.
A fine gag gift for a lawyer of your acquaintance.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85728-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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