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Joeychgo.com Book Store > Joeychgo.com books beginning with A
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Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel |
Author: Jeremy Blachman
Published: 2006-07-25 |
List price: $25.00
Our price: $2.25
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As of: November 20th, 2008 09:22:49 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Very Funny Satire on Major Law Firms
This is something quite unusual. The author runs a legal blog which I guess has provided him with much of the material for this novel. Basically, the book consists of e-mails and blog entries, mostly from the central character who is a hiring partner at a large LA law firm. This most unpleasant individual unloads opinions on many of the staples of large firm practice: summer associates; regular associates; partner competition; the administrative and support staff; and how one gets ahead in such a competitive environment. I found it to be extremely hilarious at times (e.g., in reference to summer associate activities designed to hoodwink these innocent recruits). Like all good satires it has major grains of truth sprinkled throughout. The risk in writing satire is, of course, that the author will overplay the joke, and toward the final third of the novel there is an element of this as the focal point becomes competition between the hiring partner and another partner (and enemy) concerning who will become the new chair of the firm. I think anyone familiar with or involved in large firm practice will find parts of this book (if they are honest) to be a scream, but it does convey a rather unflattering view of large firm practice and folkways--at least in some firms.
 Suspense and humor in same superb book
Anonymous Lawyer by Jeremy Blachman is a truly 21st century book that is stylistically unique. The hiring partner in a prestigious law firm sets up his own weblog, or blog--a form of Internet diary--to vent his workplace frustrations. The book is written in the form of the blog itself. It is interspersed with emails between Anonymous Lawyer and his niece, a law school student, and also between Anonymous Lawyer and various readers of the blog.
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br /Under cover of anonymity, and using nicknames for his workmates (The Jerk, The Harvard Guy, The Suck-Up and so on), as well as disguising place names and minor details, he gives a blow-by-blow account of the intrigues, infighting, cynical manipulation, and power struggles within the firm. As time passes the website becomes ever more popular. Emails pour in from lawyers and associates who identify with Anonymous Lawyers accounts, and from those who think that they know who he is and which firm he is writing about.
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br /Anonymous Lawyer becomes increasingly nervous about being identified, and confides his fears in emails to Anonymous Niece. Simultaneously he is becoming more deeply involved in a bitter power struggle with the new chairman of the firm. Finally his anonymity is penetrated by one of his colleagues, who also offers to help him in his political manueverings--at a price. The situation eventually explodes.
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br /This is a book that is extraordinarily clever in its execution. It is a real page-turner, with both suspense and hilarious humor. It captures in a powerful way some of the unique social aspects of the information age, such as the `globalisation' of private life and personal trivia through Internet weblogs. The all-pervasiveness of email is wonderfully captured in particular. For example: the boss having a heart attack `live' on email, or the ridiculous `there'll be an email, but I'm calling around to tell you first, as a courtesy.'
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br /Anonymous Lawyer is a refreshing read.
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br /Armchair Interviews says: A genuinely funny and unique book.
 Perhaps some day this author will apprehend the greatness of our legal system
Mr. Blachman has clearly not spent enough time in big firms to appreciate their salutary effects on the human spirit, and the great benefits to society imparted by our legions of industrious lawyers, each doing his or her part so that the great Spirit of Justice might prevail in our land.
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br /Perhaps it is too much to expect of a youngling lawyer, to apprehend the Adam Smith-like genius of our legal system, in which the strenuous -- nay, heroic -- efforts of tens of thousands of our best and brightest to expend their best years billing as many hours as humanly possible, so as to maximize their chances to grab the pot o' gold of a cherished partnership, paradoxically result in judicial outcomes that, on a larger scale, maximize justice and the common social good.
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br /This is a theory that I will be amplifying in my own forthcoming book, "Why Lawyers Are Good for Us All," sponsored by the ABA and the Association of American Law Schools.
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br /Sure, Mr. Blachman can be side-splittingly funny in his parody of big-firm life, but beneath the humor there is the desperate, spiritual emptiness of a man who, in his youthful impatience, does not yet appreciate how much his profession has done for humanity. He may ridicule partners like Anonymous Lawyer as narcissistic monsters, but one day he will see that they uphold great traditions that define what is best, and who deserves the greatest rewards, of our brave, new meritocracy.
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br /Mr. Blachman is, apparently, a newly-minted attorney from the Harvard Law School. His jejune sense of satire will eventually give way, like fine wine as it ages, to a more mature understanding of the subtle and exquisite beauty, the ineffable and lasting contribution to human progress, of the magnificent legal edifice that lets justice roll down upon us like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
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br /As he throws himself upon the gears of the legal machinery to which he has dedicated his life, and the talent and energy of his gifted youth is ground down to the fine dust of the wisdom of experience, I am sure we can look forward in coming years to more thoughtful paeans to his noble profession than this entertaining but ultimately nihilist screed.
Too funny!!!! So true....
I thought this was highly entertaining. I hated the main character, but he was funny and freshingly honest. The only reason it is getting 4 rather than 5 stars was the audio book version left a bit to be desired because of all the To and From and techno speak.
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Laughing All the Way to the Bank -- With MY Candy
This is one of the funniest books I've read this year. Sure, the whole "partner-who-wants-to-be-chairman" storyline of the book was a good one--but what kept me glued to the pages of ANONYMOUS LAWYER for four straight hours was the fact that I couldn't stop laughing.
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br /Two paralegals chatting incessantly? Easy solution--punch one of the them in the face. Anonymous Daughter getting fat? Easy enough to solve--let Anonymous Wife take her in for liposuction. My favorite scene from the entire book, though, has to be this one:
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br /"We had a student (intern) last summer who kept kosher. Or at least that's what she said. But anytime she got offered lunch at someplace exceptional, suddenly she wasn't kosher anymore. You asked her to go to a cheap Indian place down the street, oh, she can't, she's kosher. But if you wanted to drive up the coast for a long lunch at Nobu in Malibu, perfect, she'd eat anything. She'd eat raw shrimp wrapped in bacon with a glass of milk, off the naked stomach of a Palestinian, on Yom Kippur, if you told her it was expensive."
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br /And it's lines like that that make the fictional blog of Anonymous Lawyer at the heart of the story both funny, realistic, sarcastic, and brutally honest. Oh, and the fact that the author, Jeremy Blachman, really does write the anonymous lawyer blog (anonymouslawyer dot blogspot dot com).
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br /Wonderful read!
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