Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel |  | Author: Jeremy Blachman
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy Used: $0.03
as of 7/30/2010 17:36 PDT details
You Save: $24.97 (100%)
New (12) Used (37) Collectible (4) from $0.03
Seller: internationalbooks
Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 691524
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0805079815
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780805079814
ASIN: 0805079815
Publication Date: July 25, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Tell A Friend
Add to Wishlist
Add to Wedding Registry
Add to Baby Registry
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A wickedly funny debut novel about a high-powered lawyer whose shockingly candid blog about life inside his firm threatens to destroy him
He’s a hiring partner at one of the world’s largest law firms. Brilliant yet ruthless, he has little patience for associates who leave the office before midnight or steal candy from the bowl on his secretary’s desk. He hates holidays and paralegals. And he’s just started a weblog to tell the world about what life is really like at the top of his profession.
Meet Anonymous Lawyer—corner office, granite desk, and a billable rate of $675 an hour. The summer is about to start, and he’s got a new crop of law school interns who will soon sign away their lives for a six-figure salary at the firm. But he’s also got a few problems that require his attention. There’s The Jerk, his bitter rival at the firm, who is determined to do whatever it takes to beat him out for the chairman’s job. There’s Anonymous Wife, who is spending his money as fast as he can make it. And there’s that secret blog he’s writing, which is a perverse bit of fun until he gets an e-mail from someone inside the firm who knows he’s its author.
Written in the form of a blog, Anonymous Lawyer is a spectacularly entertaining debut that rips away the bland façade of corporate law and offers a telling glimpse inside a frightening world. Hilarious and fiendishly clever, Jeremy Blachman’s tale of a lawyer who lives a lie and posts the truth is sure to be one of the year’s most talked-about novels.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 49
 Hilarious, Best Legal Humor I have read May 5, 2010
MiamiTechnoLawyer (Miami, FL USA)
This is a great read. I could not put it down. I am partner is in six attorney law firm and never had the opportunity to work for a Mega-Law firm or any firm on the AM 100 list of the largest one hundred American law firms. Anonymous Lawyer's author is a Harvard Law School graduate who I suspect has spun a story from the his and his classmates summer internships at big firms. The protagonist of the book is upper level partner in a large firm with his eye on the prize of becoming chairman (CEO) of the firm. The protagonist is a jerk but a lovable jerk. It feels like you are a fly on the wall as summer at the big firm unfolds. Many law firms are boring places but this book is a funny, exciting read. I can't believe that by clicking the available new and used from $___ link I was able to order this book for around $3.00 for the book and $3.99 for shipping. Book came from an Amazon affiliate/associate vendor in just a few days in hard cover, in perfect condition for just $7.00 what a bargain.
 Lawyers ARE funny August 2, 2009
R. Smith (So Cal)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The blog Anonymous Lawyer is funny; the book is funny, but funnier still, the book went from $14.99 in 2007 to $0.01 (plus $4.00 shipping) in just two years!
Yikes, this tells us as much about publishing as it does about lawyering.
I hope J made his money off this book in the first two years... or bounces back with a new, second book at a new $14.95 price on amazon.
Funny stuff, evidently, has a short half-life?
At this price, give one to each law grad or law student you know, great stocking stuffers, leave a few in the airplane pockets for the next traveler....
R
 A very funny book December 18, 2008
Debra Hamel (TwitterLit.com)
I don't know much about law offices or identify particularly with the people who work in them, and I tend to avoid epistolary novels: there's something about the format that usually annoys me. But Jeremy Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer is a great read. The book--which grew out of the author's blog (apparently no longer updated), at anonymouslawer.blogspot.com--purports to be a series of blog posts by a hiring partner at a big-league law firm. Writing as "Anonymous Lawyer" (AL), Blachman's protagonist blogs about the personalities and politics and the general working conditions at his office, where the over-worked, over-stressed, and over-paid sell their souls for a promotion or a larger office. AL is himself an unrepentant bastard, wont to assign underlings impossible tasks as a means of manifesting his authority--the capricious edicts of a malevolent near deity.
"I'm a partner at a half-billion-dollar law firm. Staplers should be lining up at my desk, begging for me to use them. So should the young lawyers who think I know their names. The Short One, The Dumb One, The One With The Limp, The One Who's Never Getting Married, The One Who Missed Her Kid's Funeral--I don't know who these people really are. You in the blue shirt--no, the other blue shirt--I need you to count the number of commas in this three-foot-tall stack of paper. Pronto. The case is going to trial seven years from now, so I'll need this done by the time I leave the office today."
AL's blog posts make up the greater part of the book, but they are interspersed with email--primarily between AL and his niece. "Anonymous Niece," an idealistic Stanford senior headed to Yale Law, is interested in putting her top-notch legal education to work "helping people," a naive notion her uncle hopes to dissuade her from.
AL is engaged in a decades-long cold war with a fellow partner, "The Jerk," a battle in which success is measured in square feet of office space and face time with the boss. The book follows what happens during the summer in which AL starts blogging, when the resignation of the firm's Chairman brings his rivalry with The Jerk to a head.
I may not be able to identify with the high-octane culture that Blachman skewers, but I can appreciate his protagonist's biting sarcasm and inhumane, politically incorrect take on things. A very funny book.
-- Debra Hamel
Very Funny Satire on Major Law Firms December 14, 2007
Ronald H. Clark (WASHINGTON, DC USA)
This is something quite unusual. The author runs a legal blog which I guess has provided him with much of the material for this novel. Basically, the book consists of e-mails and blog entries, mostly from the central character who is a hiring partner at a large LA law firm. This most unpleasant individual unloads opinions on many of the staples of large firm practice: summer associates; regular associates; partner competition; the administrative and support staff; and how one gets ahead in such a competitive environment. I found it to be extremely hilarious at times (e.g., in reference to summer associate activities designed to hoodwink these innocent recruits). Like all good satires it has major grains of truth sprinkled throughout. The risk in writing satire is, of course, that the author will overplay the joke, and toward the final third of the novel there is an element of this as the focal point becomes competition between the hiring partner and another partner (and enemy) concerning who will become the new chair of the firm. I think anyone familiar with or involved in large firm practice will find parts of this book (if they are honest) to be a scream, but it does convey a rather unflattering view of large firm practice and folkways--at least in some firms.
Suspense and humor in same superb book July 19, 2007
Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Anonymous Lawyer by Jeremy Blachman is a truly 21st century book that is stylistically unique. The hiring partner in a prestigious law firm sets up his own weblog, or blog--a form of Internet diary--to vent his workplace frustrations. The book is written in the form of the blog itself. It is interspersed with emails between Anonymous Lawyer and his niece, a law school student, and also between Anonymous Lawyer and various readers of the blog.
Under cover of anonymity, and using nicknames for his workmates (The Jerk, The Harvard Guy, The Suck-Up and so on), as well as disguising place names and minor details, he gives a blow-by-blow account of the intrigues, infighting, cynical manipulation, and power struggles within the firm. As time passes the website becomes ever more popular. Emails pour in from lawyers and associates who identify with Anonymous Lawyers accounts, and from those who think that they know who he is and which firm he is writing about.
Anonymous Lawyer becomes increasingly nervous about being identified, and confides his fears in emails to Anonymous Niece. Simultaneously he is becoming more deeply involved in a bitter power struggle with the new chairman of the firm. Finally his anonymity is penetrated by one of his colleagues, who also offers to help him in his political manueverings--at a price. The situation eventually explodes.
This is a book that is extraordinarily clever in its execution. It is a real page-turner, with both suspense and hilarious humor. It captures in a powerful way some of the unique social aspects of the information age, such as the `globalisation' of private life and personal trivia through Internet weblogs. The all-pervasiveness of email is wonderfully captured in particular. For example: the boss having a heart attack `live' on email, or the ridiculous `there'll be an email, but I'm calling around to tell you first, as a courtesy.'
Anonymous Lawyer is a refreshing read.
Armchair Interviews says: A genuinely funny and unique book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 49
|
|
|
