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
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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