Selected Product:
| The Story Of My Life
Paperback
Author: Clarence Darrow
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Release Date: 1996-08-21
ISBN-10: 0306807386
ISBN-13: 9780306807381
List Price: $21.00
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children
ISBN-10: 0786851112
ISBN-13: 9780786851119
List Price:$19.95
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for The Story Of My Life by Clarence Darrow (ISBN-10: 0306807386, ISBN-13: 9780306807381).
At this time we have not yet written a review for The Story Of My Life by Clarence Darrow (ISBN-10: 0306807386, ISBN-13: 9780306807381). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
In The Story of My Life recounts, and reflects on, his more than fifty years as a corporate, labor, and criminal lawyer, including the most celebrated and notorious cases of his day: establishing the legal right of a union to strike in the Woodworkers' Conspiracy Case; exposing, on behalf of the United Mine Workers, the shocking conditions in the mines and the widespread use of child labor; defending Leopold and Loeb in the Chicago "thrill" murder case; defending a teacher's right to present the Darwinian theory of evolution in the famous Scopes trial; fighting racial hatred in the Sweet anti-Negro and the Scottsboro cases; and much more. Written in his disarming, conversational style, and full of refreshingly relevant views on capital punishment, civil liberties, and the judicial system, Darrow's autobiography is a fitting final summation of a remarkable life.
thehobophilosopher
| Customer Rating: | Over the years I have read all about Clarence Darrow but this is the first time that I have ever actually "talked" with the man. This is a very personal encounter with a very great man. I am so glad that I ordered this book.
The book reviews a bit of his childhood and a good part of his legal career. But even with sufficent knowledge of Mr. Darrow's career, it is interesting to hear about it all from him and in his own words. From a writer's point of view he is an instruction in clear and straight forward prose style. He removes a lot of streotypes and rumors.
He is writing the book at age 75. He is very melancoly and the text is somewhat poetic at times - the ending especially.
I wish that I could have know Clarence Darrow but this intimate conversation will have to do, I guess. |
Fighting the good fight.
| Customer Rating:  | Darrow takes the reader through some of his most famous cases and explains the philosophy with which he approached his career and the law in general. Any reader interested in the history of the period should find his accounts fascinating: Eugene Debs, John P. Altgeld, the MacNamara Case, the Loeb-Leopold murders, and the famous Scopes "monkey trial" case are just some of the points touched upon in the Darrow autobiography.
Darrow is a clean and competent writer, if not an artistic one. The prose is easy to read and understand. In places, the book can get frustrating because he leaves a topic well before the reader has lost interest. Future publishers would do well to publish this book together with some pointers for further reading.
The Da Capo Press edition is published with a very strange little introductory essay by Alan Dershowitz. In it, he seems more interested in rehabilitating the memory of Bryan than he does in introducing the book. The reader may want to skip it until after finishing the main book itself.
Beyond the obvious lawyer/law student audience, I would also recommend this book to readers interested in labor politics, the early history of the 20th century in the US, and social justice. |
Pessimist by Profession
| Customer Rating: | | Interesting for style as well as insight into courtroom tactics, psychology of jurors, crime and muckraking. His basic premise about jurors: If he can get them to imagine, he can get them to doubt. So his approach, always personal, was perpetually appealing to imagination. It worked, mostly, even when clients were guilty. It's his reliance on reason that makes him a skeptic. Causation is the basis of his world and personal views. Seeing the effect of the law, he argues that judging is worse than judgement, and he would dispense with both. He is at some pain to describe what he gave up to plead, rather than the life he gained by it. His seriousness can be attributed to the injustices he saw, effects he attributes more to chance than choice. He espouses the theory of continental drift, in 1939! A sharp mind interested in everything. As he says himself, if he had to do it over, . . . he'd have been a scientist. |
A Must Read Book for Lawyers-Want-to-Be
| Customer Rating: | | This book successfully captured the life of Clarence Darrow, who is no doubt one of the greatest attorneys of the early 20th century. His abilities to defend the indefensible are most extrordinary. I will certainly recommend this book to anyone espeically pre-law or law school students. |
written in the comfortable style that is darrow's hallmark
| Customer Rating: | | definitely an excellent read. for those who have read "clarence darrow for the defence" and enjoyed it, this book may very well make you feel like you are visiting an old friend. |
|
