Word: darrowing
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...book--what Professor William James had written...and which I'd fought my way through...") Teddy Roosevelt, as before, is a bully minor character, though here he is Assistant Secretary of the Navy, not New York City police commissioner. And in a brilliant bit of historical casting, Clarence Darrow, a rising courtroom wizard from Chicago, turns up to confound the good guys and defend the villain at a tense upstate New York murder trial...
...Darrow's client is a serial-killing woman who has murdered several adults and a large number of children, including at least three of her own. And here is where the plot seems a bit askew. As in real life, Darrow is a passionate death-penalty opponent. If he loses, his thoroughly guilty client goes to the electric chair. Just deserts aside, the novel has clip-clopped along too jocularly for too many chapters for this to be an acceptable outcome. Well, can the child killer go free? Perish forbid. Therefore...
...poetry was a second tincture of Walt Whitman; and, finally, not good for all that much more than correcting the roll on a pool table. But when the world thinks of Chicago, does it think of Vachel Lindsay ("We were Prairie Democrats, and this was our day") or Darrow's summation in the Leopold-Loeb Trial ("...So I be written in the Book of Love...
...pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure--that's all that agnosticism means." --CLARENCE DARROW...
...some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss of precise instinctive controls of behavior. So society must teach those controls. And when it does not, then the human arrangement breaks apart." In the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, Clarence Darrow argued essentially that crime (including the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Frank) was to be understood as a disease. A banal defense, but Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb got off with their lives...