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A Mind of their own
A Lawyer's Life: Six Decades in celebration of some of America's most remarkable entrepreneurs, artists and adventurers.
Tony Curto
BOOK REVIEW
An attorney reflects on a life working with immensely talented clients, the result of his magnetic attraction to inventive artists, in this memoir. Curto was “born into the Golden Age of lawyerdom”—New York City in 1936—and enjoyed a career at least sparked by a measure of luck. While attending the New York Law School, the dean, Daniel Gutman, asked the author if he was related to a friend with the same name. Curto was not, but as a consequence of that brief exchange, he was then known to the dean, a relationship that ultimately led to his first legal position at Buhler, King & Buhler. The firm represented a “roster of star clients,” among them Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau.
That early professional experience turned out to be decisively influential, and his career became driven by a profound attraction to creatively fertile types. That allurement is the thematic spine of this memoir: “All these stories have a common thread, which was unseen to me as I was living through them. The thread is the unique individual whose goals captured my imagination and compelled me to support them. It was these people who have defined my legal life.” The author’s remembrance is structured around these wide-ranging encounters and features anecdotes about an eclectic group, including author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, film star Linda Lovelace, football player Freeman McNeil, and journalist Harrison Salisbury. Curto writes with admirable lucidity—even potentially forbidding questions about legal technicalities are rendered fully accessible to the layperson.
While the author’s vivid stories focus on celebrities, it is not their fame per se that sets them apart for Curto—this remembrance is not the expression of infatuation with stardom. In fact, the author poignantly limns an homage to creativity in all its forms: “Simply stated, I was attracted to these special people whom I saw as ‘creators,’ fashioning their own worlds. I have always thought that artists and entrepreneurs, like God, create, while explorers and scientists discover. The difference to me is profound.” Furthermore, some of the tales the author relates intersect with grand world history.
In one of the most memorable of his anecdotes, Curto “played a pivotal role in a high-risk, international scheme that secretly conveyed the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the West,” specifically two literary classics, The First Circleand The Gulag Archipelago. Despite Curto’s obvious success and talent, this is an astonishingly unpretentious work, free of any self-congratulation. The author’s abiding aim is to highlight the virtues and accomplishments of others—his principal role is as a kind of witness to greatness.
This is a breezy read that delivers more entertainment than edification, and doesn’t challenge readers deeply. In addition, many of the luminaries discussed in the book will be obscure to a younger readership. Almost no one born after, say, 1980, will be familiar with singer/songwriter Harry Chapin. But since the memoir is about the author’s serendipitous encounters with innovative genius, that familiarity hardly matters; the point isn’t to gawk at the glitterati, but rather to appreciate the nebulous wellsprings of creative fecundity. Curto’s reminiscence is a delightful experience, easy though intriguing, a rare literary combination. A captivating tour of a lawyer’s encounters with creative genius.
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THE TIME FOR JUSTICE
How the excesses of time have broken our civil justice system
Tony Curto
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BOOK REVIEW
An insider’s view of the American legal system—that Bleak House–ish black hole—rendered for the laypeople. New York lawyer Curto—whose client list has included Yoo-hoo, Monsignor Tom Hartman and Paula Abdul—is a respected community advocate who’s earned many honors.
His book is both an overview of his 50-year career and a lively prescriptive for working through the issues that mire our courts. Central is the author’s keen analysis of a 1960 lawsuit that accused Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of defaming Esther James, his elderly constituent from Harlem. After much delay and misdirection, Powell was convicted and ordered to pay damages, but through a combination of appeals and outlandish human errors he mostly avoided doing so in a timely manner. Powell’s arrogance and ability to work the system are appalling, but hardly unique—then or now.
To combat such abuse, Curto outlines a series of “Time Fixes” designed to expedite due process by expanding and updating the court system, codifying monetary awards, and enforcing court decisions. But the book is more than an eloquent panacea. At its best, Curto’s deft handling of the social and legal complexities behind James v. Powell, as well as cases concerning folksinger Harry Chapin and Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, approaches that of investigative journalist Dominick Dunne: wry but never cynical, informed without being boorishly technical, and balanced but never leaving the reader in doubt of the ethically correct viewpoint. Time after time, as Curto points out, “The law gives the edge in justice not necessarily to the wealthy but to the defiant: the party who is under legal obligation to comply but refuses to do so…he is in an ideal position to evade justice by using time and delay as buffers—until timely justice can no longer be achieved.”
For a Judge Judy–watching society such as ours, the concept of swift legal redress is familiar enough; perhaps if lawmakers, lawyers and litigants were to adopt a comparable, less self-serving view of the legal system, then the notion of “justice delayed is justice denied” could become more than a pithy maxim. A detailed, knowledgeable examination of a failing justice system, along with some solutions to fix it.
EXCERPTING POLICIES Please review Kirkus Media’s excerpting policies before publishing any portion of this review online or in print for any use. To learn about proper attribution and to ensure your use is in compliance with our guidelines, we invite you to visit http://www.kirkusreviews.com/indieexcerpts. Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 2600 Via Fortuna Suite 130 Austin, Texas 78746
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