Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday July 31, 2010
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CIRCLE OF GREED: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees
Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon
Broadway
ISBN 978 0 7679 2994 3
532 pages
$28
Reviewed by Bryan Burrough
"Circle of Greed" is a fat, ambitious book that tells the story of William Lerach, a disgraced San Diego lawyer who before running afoul of the law earned millions of dollars and almost as many headlines by suing companies on behalf of shareholders. Journalists Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon, who met Lerach early in their careers, do a professional job tracing the arc of their subject's story and are especially good at providing the legal context for the rise of shareholder lawsuits during the 1970s and '80s. The New York firm that spearheaded this new breed of corporate ambulance chasers was Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach; Lerach headed the West Coast operation. Just about any time a big American company got in any imaginable kind of trouble, Lerach or one of his partners rushed to a courthouse and sued. Tenacious and combative, they usually managed to arm-twist their targets into big settlements. It was Lerach and his firm who brought shareholder suits against Enron, winning a $7-billion settlement.
In doing so, however, Lerach and company cut their share of corners, especially by repeatedly, and illegally, paying a handful of sleazy businessmen who served as their token plaintiffs. Lerach's type of work was, and remains, controversial. To those who look askance at Big Business, he was a crusader against fraud and an ardent defender of stockholders everywhere. To the Fortune 500 and those who love them, he was a greenmailing wolf always on the prowl to pick off its weakest members.
Dillon and Cannon view Lerach as an historic figure, the man who, in the words of the book's subtitle, "brought corporate America to its knees." He didn't, of course, and that's part of the problem. Lerach forged massive legal settlements against the likes of Charles Keating and Enron, but he was less a company-chomping shark than a nettlesome pest who sucked the blood from the sick and wounded. The Fortune 500, especially the high-tech giants of Silicon Valley, where Lerach hunted often, rallied against his ilk, floating any number of California ballot initiatives to curb such litigation, and eventually persuaded Congress to pass a law effectively ending such lawsuits. But it's hard to argue that Lerach alone provoked any of this, or that in his absence any number of other plaintiff's lawyers wouldn't have been just as successful at doing what he did.
The deeper problem with the book, however, is that despite its 500-plus pages, Lerach himself never really comes to life. We get hundreds of pages devoted to his lawsuits, but his private life by and large remains offstage; every hundred pages or so he seems to pick up a new wife and a new mansion, but that's about it. Which is a shame, because while Lerach's rise isn't all that fascinating -- it's basically a numbing parade of lawsuits filed against one stupid company or another -- his fall is truly Shakespearean. Once Dillon and Cannon get to it about halfway through the book, the narrative momentum increases exponentially. "Circle of Greed" is never a true page-turner, but in its second half it becomes a far more entertaining book.
Lerach's downfall comes courtesy of two memorable characters, the first a University of Chicago professor named Daniel Fischel, who jousted with Lerach as a witness-for-hire in several lawsuits and then sued him for abusing the legal process. Dillon and Cannon wring this revenge plot for all the drama they can, as they should. Just as compelling is a side-plot involving one of Lerach's token plaintiffs, a Los Angeles attorney named Steven Cooperman, who resorts to having his own Picassos and Monets stolen for the insurance money. Once the paintings turn up, oddly, in a Cleveland-area self-storage unit, it's only a matter of time before Cooperman turns on Lerach, giving prosecutors all they need to send them both to prison.
"Circle of Greed" is a fine story, one many a lawyer will enjoy reading, but its lack of narrative drive and a compelling central character ultimately renders it a cut below the best business books.
Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of "The Big Rich."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds
Lyndall Gordon
Viking
ISBN 978 0 670 02193 2
491 pages
$32.95
Reviewed by Jerome Charyn
"Lives Like Loaded Guns," Lyndall Gordon's book about Emily Dickinson and the fury that surrounded the publication of her poems, reads like a fabulous detective story, replete with hidden treasure, diabolical adversaries and a curse from one generation to the next. Very few of Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime, and they might have remained closeted forever had it not been for the fevered devotion of her sister and Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress. There were others involved, too: Her volcanic sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson; Susan's daughter; Mabel's daughter; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of Dickinson's mentors.
Gordon is fair to all these players, revealing their strengths and liabilities, and she corrects some of the inconsistencies of earlier biographies. But she, too, has her biases. Emily's sister-in-law is much more of a victim here and much less of a voluptuous witch who could overpower women and men with one of her stares. And Gordon provides her own speculative key to Emily's self-imposed seclusion: She believes the old maid of Amherst was epileptic, and, as with a female Philoctetes, her "wound" was the real source of her poetic power. She could not have sung to us with so much fervor, Gordon suggests, without her own dark night of epilepsy. I wouldn't want to argue with Gordon. I just don't believe her.
But this is a small price to pay for the profounder truths of "Lives Like Loaded Guns." Gordon is the first critic I know of to understand the strange "twinning" of the poet and Mabel Todd, who was almost like a phantom sister in her attachment to Emily's persona. Mabel was fetching while Emily was plain as a mouse, but that didn't stop either of them from being operatic and great showoffs. As Gordon tell us: "Both were founts of eloquence; both felt like queens; both were strong-willed, controlling; and, above all, both were workers with terrific application. Both amassed vast archives with an eye to the future."
Mabel became the first real decipherer of Emily's poems, almost by accident. After Emily died in 1886, her sister, Lavinia, known as Vinnie, discovered a vast treasure of poems locked away in one of Emily's drawers, some sewn into booklets, some scratched at the bottom of recipes or on narrow strips of paper. This was Emily's secret "Snow." Vinnie was delirious, but she didn't know quite what to do. It seems that none of the Dickinsons -- mother, father, Vinnie or brother Austin -- understood the "Loaded Gun" of Emily's arrhythmic life and lines: her fierce privacy and the heartbreaking ellipses of her poems. Her father had likened Austin's college compositions to Shakespeare and wanted to have them published, but he didn't have a clue that his minuscule daughter in her velvet snood was one of the great "singers" of the 19th century. In fact, none of the men in her life had the least idea of what her poetry was about.
Emily may have "half-found, half-invented" Susan as a reader of her poems, as Gordon suggests, but Susan was still perceptive enough to understand their worth. And yet she stalled when Vinnie asked her to help see the poems into print. She may have had good reasons: her inconsolable grief over the death of her son, Gib, and the anger she felt at the Dickinson sisters for having succored Austin in his adulterous affair with Mabel. In any case, Vinnie turned to Mabel, who worked like a demon transcribing some of the treasure. And when Emily's editor-friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson felt that her work was much too chaotic and unsmooth, Mabel sang the poems out loud so that Higginson could comprehend their melody. She was being "operatic" in the very best sense.
This first batch of poems that Mabel deciphered sold 11,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1890. But it opened up a hornet's nest within the town of Amherst. Susan felt betrayed and declared war against Vinnie and Mabel. Vinnie herself wavered, but soon she was also at war with Mabel, who seemed much too proprietary about the poems. It was a very destructive conflict because Susan, Vinnie and Mabel each had her own stash of Emily's poems that sat and sat, like secretive children, hidden from scholars and readers.
Soon Mabel's daughter, Millicent, with her sad eyes, and Susan's daughter, Martha, the smoldering belle of Amherst, joined the fray. This war between the two daughters is the most compelling portion of Gordon's book. Martha married a European swindler and confidence man named Count Bianchi, who brought her to ruin, while Millicent had a brutal love affair with another woman and later entered into a rather sexless marriage. Through all this, Martha and Millicent fired shots at each other while publishing new editions of Emily's letters and poems and mythologizing the poet as a pathetic creature who pined for love.
Alas, this is the image that remains with us, despite the fact that Emily's letters to Judge Otis Lord, a widower who had once been her father's best friend, reveal him as a man hot to marry his "Jumbo," as he liked to call Emily. Her letters spill over with a kind of teasing sexuality. But we also understand why the poet could never marry him. "In the haunted house of her imagination, a bridegroom would mount her stair at midnight," as Gordon reminds us. Judge Lord could never be this midnight man; he couldn't live within the voluptuous dream of her poetry. No one could.
"Abyss has no biographer," Dickinson warned all future readers. But Gordon is not frightened of the pits and traps and the thousand masks that Emily wears. She takes us into that undiscovered territory of the poet's favorite motif -- the dash. "Dickinson's dashes push the language apart to open up the space where we live without language." And it's into this void that Dickinson's very best readers have to go.
Jerome Charyn's most recent novel is "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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