About this title: The first year of law school is a rite of passage that only the strong survive. Scott Turow describes his experience at Harvard Law School, the country's largest, with the same vivid detail that has made him a best-selling novelist.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Warner Books
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780446351706ISBN:0446351709
Description: Fair. Tight intact binding with crease. Edgwear on cover with black remainder like mark on top and bottom of page edges. Rubbing on cover/binding where price sticker was affixed. read more
Description: Good. Spine has some creases. Covers show wear at the edges and corners. Good reading copy. Binding is Mass Market Paperback. Pages tanning. Used books may have price stickers. Most orders ship on the next business day. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780446351706ISBN:0446351709
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Never Read--Crease to cover--Daily Shipping. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. Topics Biography; Biography & Autobiography; Harvard Law School; Law; Law students; Lawyers & Judges; Legal Education; Massachusetts; Non-Fiction; Turow, Scott read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780446351706ISBN:0446351709
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Solid book with clean pages, cover shows shelf, edge & corner wear with creasing at spine, pg 181 dogged eared. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780446351706ISBN:0446351709
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780446351706ISBN:0446351709
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Moderate wear on Cover Interior Pages. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
"I read this during the first month of my husband's first year of law school. I liked it. I don't remember all of the details, but I remember that it helped me empathize with the stress and the unique academic experience that he was headed into. I'm glad that I read it. It is written about a first year law student's experiences back in 1976 - and my husband started law school at BYU in 2007 - so I am sure that a lot of things were different - but the pressures and the stress are similar and relatively universal. I liked it. It at least gave me something to do while he was busy studying. :) I would recommend it to other prospective law students AND their wives."
"I picked up this book because I've had some time off and I've always been curious about law school. For that, the book gives you an idea of the roller coaster of emotions and the anxiety involved in being a first year law student. However, the book gets repetitive and there are no surprises here. If you've been to college, you get it--just double it. I had a hard time finishing the book because there was nothing big really driving it...I didn't care if he got good grades, cracked up, or made law review. And guess what, none of those things even happened! It would have been a lot more exciting if he wasn't a middle of the road student with middle of the road feelings.
I was also surprised at the end to see that after all the complaining and issues he had with Harvard, he made nice with them and talked about how it was the most educational year of his life. It felt disingenuous and I wondered if he threw it so as not to cause a rift with the university.
Don't get me wrong, I love some of Turow's other books--but this one is a bit slow and not as exciting as his fiction."
"I read this book when Mark, my brother, was going to go off to Harvard for law school. I'm happy because Mark will be moving to Chicago later this summer -- late August to be exact.
The character in this novel Rudolph Perini with whom Scott Turow struggled is commonly believed to be a characicature of Arthur Miller, an actual Harvard professor (although in recent years, Miller's been a University Professor at NYU). Mark had Arthur Miller during his first year in law school as well. To give you a sense of Perini/Miller, one day, Miller called on someone in the Socratic manner common in law school. When that person couldn't answer, Miller called on a second person. When the second couldn't answer, Miller called on a third. When that person couldn't answer, Miller furiously slammed his book shut, told the class that they should be getting their education off the internet rather than at Harvard, and stormed out of the classroom. Other characters my brother encountered were Charlie Nesson (aka, Billion Dollar Charlie), who was the basis for the Harvard professor in "A Civil Action" who told his class to object as frequently as possible (including if they should ever fall asleep during trial and suddenly wake up), and Allen Dershowitz who gained fame in the O.J. Simpson trial, as well as for stating that there are times that torture might be acceptable in retrieving information from terrorists (despite any lack of empirical evidence to support this statement), to name a few.
The great story about Nesson, which seems as if it must be apocryphal, is that he went on vacation to Europe and didn't return to teach his courses. There was a young assistant professor on sabbatical who was about to go up for tenure. The young assistant professor was told that he was going to be flown to Europe to retrieve Charlie Nesson. If he succeeded, he'd receive tenure and if he didn't, he wouldn't. He returned with Nesson a few weeks later. Mark had Nesson for a three week term and said that's all one could take that guy for, as that was about his limits of holding things together. Mark's paper for that class sounded interesting (i.e., about different systems of rule generation -- science, religion, the law -- and how they should appropriately interact with one another), and I wish I had read it, but he often doesn't let people read his work.
I enjoyed Turow's book, although the book made me not want to go to law school. However, Mark made it through in relatively good shape, and I enjoy his stories. The only thing I didn't like about One L was that I really liked the people in it and wanted to know what happened during their 2L and 3L years."
"The single most read book by people contemplating law school. There are clear pros and cons to this. On the pro side, Turow is a good writer who structures even this supposed transcript of his memoir with a fair amount of novelistic suspense. Our hero must confront good and evil personified by his various professors (seriously, there are times when you'd think you were reading Harry Potter). Ultimately, as in a good modern novel, he must face the true nemesis that lies within (his capacity to cross over to the dark side and become an evil lawyer). Beyond entertainment, it does gently introduce the reader to the basic scene of law school with many of its organizing concepts (the curriculum, the socratic method, moot court, exam structure, etc.) and regalia (hornbooks, briefs, outlines).
However, I've already heard (and believe me, I haven't been looking all that hard) much reaction to this book as painting a fairly extreme picture of Law School that just doesn't accurately describe most of the contemporary reality. Like "The Paper Chase" (the film most recommended to would-be law students), it is set in the sacred halls of Harvard Law School, where a very particular prestige-borne madness prevails. More fundamentally, it was written 30 years ago, and at a time Turow himself acknowledges as one of tense generational conflict. He suggests that it was in the wake of Watergate that lawyers suddenly took a massive plunge in the estimation of their fellow Americans, such that even beginning law students were anxious not to replicate the degraded culture of their predecessors. Inevitably, this generated a lot of conflict with the professoriate, which appears in Turow's book as deeply divided between conservative old guard who considered humiliation a basic teaching tool and younger faculty who fashioned themselves progressives. The kind of politicization of the classroom that added considerably to Turow's anxiety and self-doubt was a product of the times. I'm sure there are new campus politics now, but not the ones depicted in "One L."
Above all, the general consensus I've seen is that Law School is just not so traumatic anymore. Which is not to say that the madness over prestige, getting top grades, making law review and all the rest have gone away. After all, those things have an economic basis in the corporate law firms themselves. Maybe this recession will change the field somehow..."
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