The further adventures of “Dr. Gonzo” as he defends the “cucarachas” — the Chicanos of East Los Angeles.Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson’s “Dr. Gonzo” a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for …
Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist (Race and Culture in the American West Series)
Loren Miller was one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960s, particularly in the fields of housing and education. With co-counsel Thurgood Marshall, he argued two landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decisions effectively abolished racially restrictive housing covenants. One of these cases, Shelley v. Kraemer …
A New York Times Notable Book of 1996It was in tolling the death of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835 that the Liberty Bell cracked, never to ring again. An apt symbol of the man who shaped both court and country, whose life “reads like an early history of the United States,” as the Wall Street Journal noted, …
The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer
“Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.” —Douglas Brinkley The Fall of the House of Zeus tells the story of Dickie Scruggs, arguably the most successful plaintiff’s lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Scruggs made a …
An authoritative, deeply researched biography of the most controversial and outspoken Supreme Court justice of our time and how he chose to be “right” rather than influential.Antonin Scalia knew only success in the first fifty years of his life. His sterling academic and legal credentials led to his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to the Court of Appeals …
When the stock market crashed in 1929, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio. After he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he decided to set down his impressions in his diary.This …
Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise
In 1820 the Missouri controversy erupted over the issue of slavery in the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. It fell to Jesse Burgess Thomas (1777–1853), a junior U.S. senator from the new state of Illinois, to handle the delicate negotiations that led to the Missouri Compromise. Thomas’s maturity, good judgment, and restraint helped pull the country …
Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice
Brilliant. Colorful. Visionary. Tenacious. Witty. Since his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1986, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has been described as all of these things and for good reason. He is perhaps the best-known justice on the Supreme Court today and certainly the most controversial. Yet most Americans have probably not read even one of his several …
A Cowboy in the Kitchen: Recipes from Reata and Texas West of the Pecos
Cookbook buyers and foodies the world over have come to count on Ten Speed to introduce exciting young chefs and up-and-coming cuisines. In the tradition of Mark Miller’s COYOTE CAFE, ROY’S FEASTS FROM HAWAII, and CHARLIE TROTTER’S, we are proud to bring you a haute take on one of America’s most traditional cuisines-that of the Texas ranch. But …
Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices
A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America’s leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A …