A Thousand Times More Fair by Kenji Yoshino

Published by Ecco on April 12, 2011

Law Professor Kenji Yoshino majored in English at Harvard before attending Yale Law School. Unsurprisingly, he never lost his love of Shakespeare. In A Thousand Times More Fair, Yoshino explores the oft-considered relationship between beauty and justice -- specifically, what Shakespeare's beautifully written plays can teach us about justice.

Reading Shakespeare is like reading the Bible (or, for that matter, the Constitution): there is much of value to be mined, but the reader must be wary of fanciful interpretations. Fortunately, Yoshino's legal scholarship compels him to base his conclusions on evidence. Yoshino engages in a careful reading of the plays, liberally quoting lines and citing a variety of external sources to divine their meaning. Readers who are more interested in the plays than the law will appreciate this book for its nuanced understanding of Shakespeare. Indeed, this is not a book just (or even primarily) for legal scholars. Although Yoshino's discussion of the plays is informed by a lawyer's perspective, the legal principles that he elucidates almost become secondary to his broader reading of the plays. Nearly everyone should learn something new, or see a play or two in a different way, after reading this book.

Yoshino argues that Titus Andronicus teaches audiences that the rule of law is preferable to vengeance; that retribution must be left to the public (i.e., government) rather than the private individual because, as the play demonstrates, private revenge "necessarily dooms the avenger and his society." Although Hamlet also centers upon a desire for vengeance, Yoshino uses it to discuss the concept of perfect (or poetic) justice.

The Merchant of Venice would be an ideal vehicle for addressing the difference between law and justice; contract law entitles Shylock to a pound of Antonio's flesh, but mercy (the quality of which "is not strain'd") would produce a more just result. Yoshino instead uses the play to discuss a more subtle point: how the language of the law is manipulated (the daily task of lawyers), as exemplified by Portia's skillful use of rhetoric to deny enforcement of Shylock's contract.

In Measure for Measure, Yoshino finds support the argument that good judging is not solely about "empathy" (to use President Obama's term) or a "strict construction" of the law (to use a phrase favored by conservatives). Rather, the phrases represent "competing values that must each be honored." Shakespeare agreed, according to Yoshino, as demonstrated by the ability of Escalus finds a middle ground between ignoring a bad law and enforcing it unjustly.

Yoshino turns to four historical dramas to explore the legitimacy of a ruler's authority and to ask whether "just rule is nothing more than what power calls itself." In a related discussion of political authority, Yoshino argues that The Tempest champions the notion that wise rulers eventually relinquish their power voluntarily (just as Prospero puts aside his magic at the play's end). Of course, the notion of a political leader giving up power in the absence of scandal is virtually unknown to modern politics; perhaps our political leaders should spend more time studying Shakespeare.

Yoshino's take on King Lear is insightful but his argument that Lear's madness allows him to see beyond the law to a higher form of "immortal justice" and then to surrender justice for love is interesting but a bit of a stretch. While well argued, Yoshino's least interesting point (to me) concerns one of Shakespeare's most interesting plays: Yoshino uses Macbeth to exemplify the concept of "natural justice," an antiquated notion that is widely rejected in the modern world.

Yoshino is least convincing in his discussion of Othello, both in his assertion that the play tells us much about the legal art of factfinding and in his comparison of Desdemona's handkerchief to O.J. Simpson's glove. Just as Othello was misled by the handkerchief, Yoshino says, Simpson's jury was misled by the glove. But Othello was misled by Iago's lies about the handkerchief, not by the handkerchief itself, and the Simpson jury based its acquittal on a host of evidence suggesting that prosecution witnesses had planted evidence and had perjured themselves while testifying -- all of which presumably created (in their minds) a reasonable doubt: the critical legal standard that Yoshino neglects to mention and that played no role in Othello.

In addition to discussing the Simpson trial, Yoshino relies on recent political history to illustrate certain legal principles, including the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 and Bill Clinton's unsuccessful attempt to manipulate language by positing multiple definitions of the word "is." Readers with strong political opinions who are unwilling to entertain ideas that disagree with their own might be put off by those discussions. I emphasize again, however, that there is much to learn about Shakespeare's plays from this engaging book -- politics notwithstanding.

Yoshino doesn't bog down his lively writing with legal jargon; most of the legal concepts he discusses are familiar to nonlawyers and he carefully explains those that are not. If you like Shakespeare (and who doesn't?), you will likely enjoy (and benefit from reading) A Thousand Times More Fair.

RECOMMENDED

Until Tuesday by Luis Carlos Montalván

Published by Hyperion on May 3, 2011

Until Tuesday is much more than the feel-good story about service dogs I was expecting.  Luis Carlos Montalván's book provides a brief but uncompromising look at the conduct of America’s most recent military incursion into Iraq and the impact it had on soldiers who were placed in impossible positions.  It also indicts businesses that discriminate against assistance dogs.  None of that should put off dog lovers who want a feel-good story; Montalván’s relationship with Tuesday, his golden retriever, is at the book’s heart, and it is deeply moving.

The first three chapters imaginatively recreate Tuesday’s training, including a look at Tuesday’s life in prison while he participated in the Puppies Behind Bars program, bonding with an inmate and helping the inmate hold onto his humanity in an inhumane environment.  Tuesday also put in time at Children’s Village, where troubled kids learn about responsibility and success by helping to train service dogs.

The next five chapters tell Montalván’s story.  It mirrors writing that came out of the Vietnam War in its complaint that the nation’s leaders lied to the public, neglected the troops, and did too little to help veterans.

Montalván -- a National Guard officer who had been in uniform for more than a decade -- arrived at Al-Waleed, Iraq, in 2003.  While working to keep arms and insurgents from crossing into Iraq from Syria, Montalván was ambushed and barely escaped assassination.  The severity of his injuries (both physical and psychological) wasn’t immediately recognized -- in part because he refused the requests of medics who wanted him to go to Baghdad for x-rays.  When he returned to Colorado in 2004, the “counseling” he received was brief and ineffective; he feared that requesting more would jeopardize his military career.  Unable to adjust to a quiet life and faced with a failed marriage, he signed up for a second tour in Iraq and was assigned as a liaison officer to the Iraqi Special Forces.  When the Iraqi Army started “a campaign of tribal and ethnic cleaning against the Sunnis” with the tacit support of the American Army, Montalván “could no longer understand what [his] men were fighting and dying for.”  He felt betrayed by leaders who turned their attention to “the media, the message, the public back home -- anything and everything, it seemed, but the soldiers under their command.”  After he wrote a critical op-ed that was published in The New York Times, he received an honorable discharge and returned home with PTSD:  an umbrella diagnosis that encompassed his feelings of anxiety and paranoia, his withdrawal and isolation, his bitter days and sleepless nights.

The final sixteen chapters tell the story I was expecting and that dog lovers will recognize:  a story of training and bonding, loving and learning.  A dog and man with complementary personalities: codependent companions, mutual providers of support.  Although Montalván tells a serious story, he also takes the time to describe Tuesday’s playful antics, wonderful passages that made me laugh out loud.

Even in those chapters, however, the war lurks.  Some politically-minded readers might not appreciate Montalván's take on the Bush administration … or, for that matter, his disappointment with the Obama administration.  Montalván is a bright, emotionally honest man who isn’t afraid to express a forceful point of view; it didn’t bother me but it might anger some, so be warned.  Not all of this book has a "feel good" quality.

Until Tuesday tells a personal story; it isn’t filled with generalized facts about service dogs or PTSD.  I can’t say I learned anything new from it, but that might be because I once helped someone with a social anxiety disorder who can’t leave his home without the calming influence of a service dog.  He was experiencing the same discrimination that Montalván describes:  restaurant managers, worried about violating health codes, mistakenly (and illegally) claim that a dog isn’t really a service dog unless its owner is blind.  I also live next door to a service dog that assists a woman in a wheelchair.  Based on those experiences, and having a golden retriever of my own, I believed every word of Luis Carlos Montalván’s account of how his relationship with Tuesday made it possible for him to reclaim his life -- despite the discrimination he encountered.

Tuesday reminded me so much of my own golden (particularly the description of Tuesday breaking training to dive into a swimming pool to steal the other dogs’ toys) that I have no choice but to recommend this book.  Fortunately, the book merits that recommendation; the story it tells may not be packed with fresh information, but it is memorable and moving and richly rewarding.

RECOMMENDED

Fire Season by Philip Connors

Published by Ecco on April 5, 2011

Fire Season chronicles one of the many summers Philip Connors spent as a lookout in the Gila National Forest, sitting alone in a tower, scanning the treetops for smoke. Connors makes the arduous hike to his lookout post every year because "here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia." It is writing of that caliber, as much as the content, that makes Fire Season worth reading.

Although Connors writes lovingly of trees and grass, Fire Season is as much a tribute to solitude as it is an appreciation of nature's beauty. Connors writes that he does "not so much seek anything as allow the world to come to me, allow the days to unfold as they will, the dramas of weather and wild creatures." Connors channels (and makes frequent reference to) Abbey and Leopold in his descriptions of majestic nature, but also brings to mind (and sometimes quotes) Thoreau in his loving homage to isolation.

Connors peppers his book with lessons in history (the Warm Springs Apache hid from the Cavalry in the wilderness he now surveys) and biology (while moths, beetles, and tarantula hawks are some of the smaller creatures he observes, bears are a more frequent subject of comment). He provides a brief overview of conservationist philosophy and its history. Connors makes interesting what might in the hands of a less talented writer be dull, but the work still comes across as a hodge-podge: clusters of random facts connected only by their shared geography. Although the book is quite short, it reads as if Connors was searching for filler: a section discusses the unpublished notebook Jack Kerouc kept during his experience as a lookout; another discusses his experiences on 9/11; another recounts the vanishing wolf population in the Southwest. And given that the book it so short, it contains a surprising amount of redundancy: there are only so many times a writer needs to say that some fires are good and others not so good before the reader gets it.

My larger complaint (if it can be called that) about Fire Season is that it contains so little that is fresh. I'm not a biologist or ecologist or forester, but I knew before reading Fire Season (as I suspect most people did) that fires are necessary to the health of a forest environment, that the Forest Service didn't always understand that, and that public policy decisions about whether to let a fire burn are difficult to make and often controversial. Connors adds no depth to that discussion; his job is to look for smoke, not to make policy decisions, and his career is in journalism (and bartending), not forestry or firefighting. (There is, in fact, little in the book about the actual suppression of wildfires. Readers looking for an excellent fictional account of fighting forest fires should check out Andrew Piper's The Wildfire Season.) I'm not sure there's much to learn about fire from reading Connors' book that a reasonably well read person won't already know.

Connors' writing is strongest when it is most personal. Having a spouse who lives by himself in a tower every summer might challenge some marriages (while it might improve others); I thought it was interesting to read about the impact Connors' summer career has had on his marriage. When he writes about finding a fawn (apparently injured) and encountering hikers and the workings of his mind, Fire Season shines. Connors brings his dog into the wilderness for companionship and his description of the dog's personality change when transitioning to mountain life reinforces my belief that all books are made better by the inclusion of a dog.

In short, what Connors does in Fire Season has been done elsewhere, often in greater detail and with more authority, but the book nonetheless has value for the glimpse it provides of the sort of person who is content to sit in a tower for long stretches, pondering the wilderness, and for Connors' beautiful descriptions of (mostly) unspoiled forests and mountains.

RECOMMENDED