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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
