Today's New Blawg

Lawyers of the World, Unite! seems an appropriate enough blawg to highlight on Labor Day. Like the holiday itself, author William Shears is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of certain workers (lawyer type ones)—and to providing a complement to Shears' book.

"William Shears is a pseudonym for two lawyers who are older, wiser, richer, and more powerful than they were when they started out," reads the back of the review copy of The Young Lawyer's Guide to Money and Power I received awhile back, scheduled for an October 31, 2003 release. Since it's not every day I'm asked to review a forthcoming book I was intrigued, and surmised the mysterious authors might be blawgers. If they weren't before, they are now. Their inaugural August 28 post kicks things off with a poetry contest "about our worst experiences with the law!" (Back in my days as an English major, we would have called this a "dark genre").

I started the book over the weekend, and so far I Like It Quite A Bit. It's full of common and uncommon sense about how to approach a legal career, Apple/1984 iconography applied to educational norms, and cleverly accurate observations:

Sooner or later, you will run into one or more lawyers who are psychopaths ... Such people often do quite well in the legal profession. They treat clients well, win victories for them, and maintain their reputations through deception. If there's a metaphorical string of bodies behind them, they somehow manage to convince the world that the victims were suicides.

So far the only thing that has made me cringe too much is the title—but then, maybe I'm not giving the authors enough credit for a heaping dollop of postmodern irony. In any event, I'm honored to have been asked to review the book, and will do so here in greater detail before its release.