January 2020 - Recommended Reads

Name: Rees Griffiths

Title: In Hoffa’s Shadow

Author: Jack Goldsmith

Genre: Non-fiction

Why I Liked It:

“This works on so many levels,” classmates used to say about a favorite movie or book. Jack Goldsmith's In Hoffa’s Shadow tells multiple stories that he seamlessly integrates into an investigation of those insoluble mysteries of the 1970s, who killed Jimmy Hoffa, and why and where are his remains. Goldsmith explains the reasons for Hoffa's disappearance and advocates for his adoptive father's innocence with the persuasive art and science of a successful trial lawyer, without resolving who did it and what and where the corpus delecti may be. However, it is the three other stories Goldsmith tells that give this book its narrative force. Those stories: Goldsmith's self-imposed isolation from his family, their reconciliation and his ultimate forgiveness by his hoodlum father; Goldsmith's own rapid rise and relatively short but meteoric fall as a star of the Federalist Society; and the story of Hoffa's role in the rise of the labor movement and Hoffa's fall in the decline of trade unions-that and his views of the broader social and economic consequences of the decline of unions- will keep you turning the pages.

After the elder Jack Goldsmith and his upper crust family abandon the author and his mother, Chuckie O'Brien (the Irishman of the new release of the same name), marries Goldsmith's mother and adopts her children, rescuing them from poverty and replacing the absent Goldsmith as a supportive father figure, much as Jimmy Hoffa adopted O'Brien and nurtured him after the murder of O'Brien's father. By conviction acquired at the University of Chicago, young Goldsmith concludes that labor unions provide only corruption and inefficiency, and no economic benefit to members, in Adam Smith's idealized world of perfectly competitive labor and capital markets.

As a matter of self-interest and ambition, as he rises rapidly in the Justice Department, Goldsmith severs all ties with his father (O'Brien was, at a minimum, an important link between Hoffa and organized crime), eliminates O'Brien from his life story and memory and demeans and condemns him to other family members. When his equally firm convictions force him out of George W. Bush's administration and derail his personal political and judicial ambitions (Goldsmith was the solid conservative who concluded that many elements of the warrantless wiretap and search program established after 9/11 were both unauthorized by statute and unconstitutional), Goldsmith begins to reappraise the other certitudes in his life, including his wholly negative judgment of O'Brien and his acceptance that the ends of criminal prosecution justify the means necessary to obtain conviction.

An equally great listen or read, good enough that I don't plan to spoil the book by seeing the Scorsese-DeNiro-Pacino-Pesci version now playing in a theater near you or on Netflix.

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Name: Fran Butterfoss fTitle: The Silent Patient

Author: Alex Michaelides

Genre: Fiction

Why I Liked It: I generally am not a fan of psychological thrillers, but this was a book club choice, so I read it. The novel takes a few chapters to set the plot in motion, but it picks up speed after that. Alicia Berenson is an artist married to her fashion photographer husband, Gabriel, and living in London. When Gabriel returns home late one night, she brutally kills him and refuses to speak again. After her trial, she is committed to an institution for several years. Finally, a psychotherapist, who is obsessed with her case, feels that he can reach her and break her silence. A few members of my book club were much more familiar with this genre and guessed the ending, but I was hopelessly surprised. I didn’t expect to get drawn into the plot so easily, but I found myself racing to the end to find out what would happen next.

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Name: H. Kell Yang

Title: Catch and Kill

Author: Ronan Farrow

Genre: Non-fiction

Why I Liked It:

The author demonstrates incredible courage, both personal and professional to persist in the face of enormous pressure from NBC executives, powerful attorneys, and potentially physical threats on his life by hired thugs to pursue a captivating story about sexual abuse (serial rape) by a powerful executive, one Howard Weinstein with virtually unlimited financial resources. While the writing style may seem a bit redundant at times, one could argue that's necessarily thorough to document the history of actions of the predator.