Word: arlen
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...Black Panther raid may have begun the dismantling of the Daley machine. Michael J. Arlen largely ignores the complex political consequences of the case in his little book on Hanrahan's trial. But An American Verdict is a very effective novelistic piece of reporting in which the trial becomes a symbol of the modern American city...
...Arlen deftly interweaves episodes in the Hanrahan trial with scenes showing the inner workings of the city. His descriptive mistakes show some unfamiliarity with the details of Chicago life, but his overall analysis is remarkably perceptive. Arlen can start with a little episode or a single phrase and eventually sum up an attitude of the police or an ethnic group or even the changing moods which strike a whole city...
ARTHUR COHEN, 43, boss of the U.S.'s largest publicly held real estate enterprise, Manhattan-based Arlen Realty & Development (holdings: $1.5 billion). Cohen is worth more than $50 million. Began in 1954 by building houses on Long Is land; made his first million speculating in Florida. Went on to construct luxury apartments and small office buildings...
...mystery is why both books should be so disappointing. As a television watcher for The New Yorker during the worst of the Viet Nam War, Arlen wrote a mordantly brilliant series of essays that have been collected in The Living Room War. His second book was Exiles, a precise and lovely memoir of his parents. But An American Verdict seems oddly negligent...
...Arlen's principal focus is the trial of State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who was accused - and acquitted - of conspiring to obstruct justice in inves tigating the facts of the police raid, in which the killings were presented as "self-defense." Arlen surrounds his tri al narrative with the atmospherics of Chicago. But it is mostly offhand, as if Arlen knows, as the reader knows, that Mike Royko has done Richard Daley better and Norman Mailer got Chica go down much better five years...