A well-reported, densely written saga with a gigantic cast of characters that becomes difficult to track through the...
Two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists explore the world of a lawyer who became wealthy by representing plaintiffs against multinational corporations committing fraud, but who simultaneously defraded the legal system.
California Monthly executive editor Dillon (Lost at Sea, 1998) and politicsdaily.com deputy editor Cannon (co-author: Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy, 2008, etc.) delve into the career of William S. Lerach, a San Diego–based lawyer in the New York City law firm of Milberg Weiss. Specializing in class-action lawsuits, Lerach sued Fortune 500 companies—including Enron, Tyco and WorldCom—on behalf of shareholders who believed they deserved recompense for the misdeeds of corporate officers. The plaintiffs would each normally receive relatively small monetary awards combined with the satisfaction of seeing corporate managers admit wrongdoing. Lerach and his law partners, meanwhile, would each win fees reaching into the millions of dollars. Lerach, born in Pittsburgh in 1946, tended to portray his upbringing as deprived, partly because his family had allegedly been taken advantage of by heartless drones from corporate America. In fact, the authors disclose, Lerach grew up in a stable, middle-class family. Nonetheless, his sense of perceived injustice drove him to the plaintiff’s bar, with lucrative private-sector institutions as his targets. The lawyer’s eventual celebrity grew not only because of his skilled lawyering but also his aggressive behavior—including highly publicized verbal challenges—toward nearly everybody who crossed his path, sometimes including his mentor Melvyn Weiss. Although the authors portray a hidden humanitarian streak in Lerach, for the most part he comes across as deeply unpleasant. His final downfall, which led to a prison term and the termination of his law practice, centers on a scheme to recruit plaintiffs with cash. He is scheduled to complete his prison term during 2010.
A well-reported, densely written saga with a gigantic cast of characters that becomes difficult to track through the ever-shifting narrative.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2994-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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