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on the side of right, loved by many women, played by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind. His days-long closing arguments delivered without notes won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang.
Darrow left a promising career as a railroad lawyer during the
tumultuous Gilded Age in order to champion poor workers, blacks, and
social and political outcasts against big business, Jim Crow, and
corrupt officials. He became famous defending union leader Eugene Debs
in the land-mark Pullman Strike case and went from one headline case to
the next—until he was nearly crushed by an indictment for bribing a
jury. He redeemed himself in Dayton, Tennessee, defending schoolteacher
John Scopes in the "Monkey Trial," cementing his place in history.
Now, John A. Farrell draws on previously unpublished correspondence and
memoirs to offer a candid account of Darrow's divorce, affairs, and
disastrous finances; new details of his feud with his law partner, the
famous poet Edgar Lee Masters; a shocking disclosure about one of his
most controversial cases; and explosive revelations of shady tactics he
used in his own trial for bribery.
Clarence Darrow is a sweeping, surprising portrait of a leg-endary legal mind.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 27, 2012 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781452626314
- File size: 577334 KB
- Duration: 20:02:46
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Attorney Clarence Darrow is best known for defending a high school teacher in the "Scopes Monkey Trial" on the teaching of evolution in public schools. But he accomplished far more than that. He spent many years defending publicly despised defendants against a vengeful justice system. In fact, his life is so interesting that it would make for engaging listening under most circumstances. But when you add an adept reader, you have a production that will keep commuters listening in the driveway after returning home from work. Danny Campbell doesn't read the story so much as tell it--much in the way Darrow might have spoken to a jury: with a studied casualness and familiarity designed to inform while clothed in the air of a polished raconteur. R.C.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine -
July 11, 2011
Farrell's (Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century) latest book is an immensely personal ode to a fearlessly progressive maverick lawyer, larger than life socialite, and fiercely independent gentleman. Darrow's financial setbacks, domestic volatility, and public scandal seem trivial when compared to his consummate performances in the dock, where his overarching articulations, witticisms, and wisdom occasionally belied deceit. Making a name for himself in a late nineteenth century Chicago plagued with crime and bloodshed, American industrialism, and the railroad boom could have set him up for life. Instead, he chose to tackle social unrest, using his intellect and eloquence in the "defense of the underdog," representing gangsters, psychopaths, and crooked politicians with miraculous, if not always just, results. Darrow was an early proponent of Civil Rights, dealing with graphic cases of related atrocities, which Farrell meticulously relays. A master of the lengthy closing argument, Darrow cited Freud and Nietzsche in his radical and dramatic courtroom speeches, none more so than the infamous Monkey Trial in which he ridiculed closed-minded religious fundamentalists in championing "academic liberty, free thought, and scientific inquiry." Though Darrow was a man who walked with kings, he never lost the common touch, and Farrell's biography finally does him justice.
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