Word: turow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...really Turow's fault that Harvard's name carries the prestige it does, but he certainly goes out of his way to exploit it. He prefaces his book--essentially a blow-by-blow account or his first year--with his excuse, suggesting he decided to write about Harvard because it's the oldest and biggest law school (which he says makes the experience of students here exemplary of all law students in America), and, of course, because he goes here. Nonsense. One L is a paean to status symbols, a description of Turow's willing indoctrination into the country...
Formerly a teacher of creative writing at Stanford--you wouldn't know it from the prose in One L, which has outrageous errors like "least painless" instead of "most painless" or "least painful"--Turow says he came to Harvard to meet his enemy. Who is the enemy? Good question. For most of One L, Turow wanders around that point, never quite explaining the theme that's supposed to tie the daily experiences together. Is it the legal system as it sustains class society and the state? Is it Harvard Law School as it breeds privilege and promotes inequality? Just what...
Eventually, we understand. Turow has met the enemy, and it is he. It is his own ambition, his own desire to achieve the trappings of success that did not accompany his career as a teacher, that he must face. If he can survive the tensions of the Socratic method in Contracts, if he can make it through the endless hours of case preparation, if he can surmount the embarrassment of blowing his presentation in the Ames Court contest, why then, Scott Turow can survive anything. "That driven quest for prominence which brings us here," he writes, "leads us, once...
...many ways, Harvard Law School is the top of the American corporate heap, but Turow fails completely to examine what that system means for those who have not attained the pinnacle. His only attempt at such critical evaluation comes in the middle of the book, when he describes a speech by Ralph Nader. Nader asks whose law is being taught here, who benefits from the current legal system. "How many sharecroppers," Nader asks his Law School audience, "do you think sue Minute Maid?" For a few hours, Turow says, he was convinced that Nader was right; he could...
...BECOMES more and more clear as Turow goes through the year that he will end up a corporate lawyer, in one of those big firms that handle the accounts of the largest, least lovable companies. Turow's first-year class was polled by the Harvard chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, with astonishing results: a large segment of the first-year class did not want to end up practising corporate law, but expected it would end up doing just that after graduating from Harvard. He writes, "For those students, the money, the power, the training, the quality of practice...