A warts-and-all portrait that leaves readers lamenting Darrow’s private failings, while still in awe of his immensely...
A comprehensive biography of the storied defense attorney.
At midlife, embarrassed by his comfortable railroad practice so at odds with his personal beliefs, Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) took on a series of high-profile cases whose underlying political, sociological and economic issues placed him at the white-hot center of the Progressive Era. His starring role in these courtroom dramas turned him into a legend. Making elaborate use of transcripts, observers’ accounts, correspondence and newspaper reports, Farrell (Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, 2002) chronicles Darrow’s most celebrated trials in detail: the defense of labor leaders Eugene Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood; the McNamara brothers, charged with firebombing the Los Angeles Times headquarters; homosexual thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb; Ossian Sweet, accused of murder for defending his home against a racist mob; John Scopes for teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law; and the friends and family of Thalia Massie, on trial in Hawaii for a so-called “honor killing.” These cases—including two in which Darrow, almost surely guilty, was himself tried for jury tampering—dominate the narrative, but Farrell neatly places them within the larger context of this complicated man’s crowded life and practice. He covers Darrow’s small-town upbringing, his brief country-lawyer career, his move to Chicago and his rise within the city’s political and legal establishment. A puzzling mix of towering ego and bottomless compassion, Darrow was also an author and an in-demand lecturer who more than dabbled in politics. Also at home within bohemian circles, Darrow preferred the company of artists, professors and poets. (Edgar Lee Masters, who grew to despise him, was for a time his legal partner.) Twice-married, Darrow was also an inveterate womanizer, money grubber and shameless self-promoter who often bent the ethical code to combat what he saw as corrupt prosecutions. Farrell unflinchingly addresses these shortcomings, even as he underscores the genuine brilliance of a still-unmatched advocate for underdogs everywhere.
A warts-and-all portrait that leaves readers lamenting Darrow’s private failings, while still in awe of his immensely consequential career.Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-52258-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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