BOOKS AS GIFTS

 Holiday books and gift giving. 

Tis the season to sit down next to a roaring fire, have a cup of tea while it is snowing outside, and read a good book. And we recommend giving books as the best gift. 

So what does Rumpole recommend? 

In the last two years we re-discovered Patti Smith- a woman who is simply a pure genius. Her remarkable life story, beginning with running away from her New Jersey home as a teenager and having fate intervene and place the soon to be artist Robert Maplethorpe in her life- and their life journey together until he died of AIDS- is recounted in her book Just Kids. We stumbled on the book in an airport on the way to NYC which much of her life story takes place. It's a life affirming, potentially life altering book. And if you have already read that one, then her new book (which she just promoted at the Miami Book Fair) is A Book of Days- one of her photographs and short description of it for each day of the year.  

This is a woman who can extensively quote from 18th and 19th century poets and has throughout her life visited the graves of those who inspire her. We have heard her say the grave of Sylvia Plath was the loneliest she has ever visited. Her vignette of her encounter with chess champion Bobby Fisher as he prepared to play Boris Spassky is remarkable, as is her visit to Fisher's grave many years later. 

If you must read about law, then Democratic Justice, the biography of Felix Frankfurter is a worthy read.  Prodigy, German immigrant (before there were walls), Harvard Law Professor, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Labor mediator, personal diplomat for President Wilson dealing with "the Jewish problem" and Palestine during WWI, friend of Justice Brandies ( Frankfurter's hand in founding of the New Republic Magazine and the New Republic's support of Brandies helped overcome the antisemitism behind the opposition to Brandeis's appointment to the court) and protégé of  Justice Holmes (who is perhaps the first Justice to intelligently articulate the philosophy of the limited role of Judges in interpreting the law). It is worth the time to read. 

Give "Year Of Dangerous Days" to your favourite Judge or prosecutor or PD so they can learn what Miami was like during the late 70s-80s and how the cocaine traffickers and cocaine wars changed our small southern town. 

Princes at War for the WWII buff and the Royal family's involvement in battling national socialism in the 1930s and WWII. 

The madness of the 45th president and all his many short comings are detailed in the audio book "The Trump Tapes" by Bob Woodward. Woodward recorded 18 separate interviews with the president. What emerges in his own twisted words, is a man of limited intelligence, fixated on certain ideas and events that he cannot get rid of. For example, over and over throughout the years that the interviews occur, Trump returns to an incident in the 1980s when Woodward and Bernstein visited him in New York to consider a book about him. The addled President frequently returns to that episode, repeatedly reminding Woodward of the opportunity he missed in not doing that book, often raising the incident in a manner in which it is clear he didn't remember raising it in a prior conversation. Along with the now familiar speech pattern of "Nobody has ever seen...",  and "People are saying..." while trumpeting his greatness in lies- "the greatest economy of all time....",  and "nobody can believe the relationship I formed with North Korea", what emerges from hearing Trump speak is the shock that that someone so dumb and mentally ill could reach the presidency. 

Paul Newman In His Own Words is a fascinating insight into a complicated 20th century icon. Newman recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with Stewart Stern, a screenwriter and longtime friend. Then Newman burned the tapes and the project was over. THEN....transcripts of the tapes were found in Stern's records when he passed away and the book was created. 

At Patti Smith's suggestion, we are starting Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender series with the first book in the series about the Swedish detective- Faceless Killers. Join the journey with us,