Is een pakkende rechtbankthriller met zeer veel aanvullende info over de jaren zestig. De hoofdpersonages in de zaak kennen elkaar zeer goed. De mensen van OM, de rechter en de mensen van de verdediging hebben samen gestudeerd in de jaren zestig. Daarom is de oorspronkelijk titel:The laws of our fathers een zeer mooie keuze.
In het boek verwijst men ook naar het boek van Colson Whitehead/ de Ondergrondse Spoorweg. een zeer goed boek. Een aanrader.
Verder krijgen we wel mooi opmerkingen mee:
- in de recht zaal is spijt zelden de overheersende emotie.
-je bent rechter. Je hebt het gemaakt. Niet in de wereld van het recht. Ik ben maar een ambtenaar. Ik ben een hogere middenkaderbureaucraat.
- De jaren zestig worden vaak gezien als een storm die overtrok, een wervelwind die voorbij raasde, en waarvan de schade reeds lang is hersteld. Wij denken dan terug aan de Provo´s met hun witte fietsenplan. De kabouters. Leuven Vlaams enz.

I was put off by Turow after the last book I read of his, but my friend Jane gave me this one to try. After Innocent and Burden of Proof, very hard acts to follow, I was hoping that he still had more great books in him, and this one qualifies. a Great read, it was hard to put down after about the first 40 pages or so, which it took to get the gang lingo figured out and sort out the characters, which there are many. Spread between two times, 1970-1971 and 1995-1996m it was confusing for awhile, but it all fell into place. There is some beautiful philosophy in this book, great wisdom and insight into the human endeavor, there is love, and there is crime. The courtroom scenes are brilliantly done, and as a reader, about the time I thought I was lost, there would be just enough info to get me back on the plot and mysteries of it. Wonderfully written. Characters are alive, real, well defined and I felt I knew and understood them-finally, at the end.

This book is the fourth legal thriller written by Scott Touro and his fifth book overall. Published in 1996, it is the story of a group of 70s era college students who meet 25 years later in a courtroom where a murder trial is being held following the execution of one of their members.

One of the theme is how the burdens of youth never seem to be resolved. Hobie still faces discrimination because he is black, Seth shoulders the legacy of his parents having been interred in the concentration camps because they are Jewish and Sonny realizes that the limitations put on her as a woman just never lessen. I had seen women holding signs at the women’s march two years ago: 50 years later we are still protesting things that we thought would have been better by now.

To speak and be heard, to hear and understand.... a trial lawyer, a journalist and a judge meet in a courtroom to determine the guilt or innocence of Nile, who had been a child back in 1970.

Liked the beginning of this, the case is a good set up, wondering what really happened.... but THEN we go down a memory lane chapter or two (no, actually, the book is half flashbacks) which seems to be an excuse for Turow to revisit his days at UC Berkeley in the 60's... assuming he had some... and it's a little BOR-ing. I was there and it was more interesting than this. It's Ok, but could have been handled in a few pages... Now that I have nearly finished it, this is NOT a legal mystery or thriller. It's a character study of a female judge and people she knew in college. I liked the courtroom scenes a lot, but there are very few of them. I expect no more surprises at this point but will read the last 50-100 pages and see if my opinion changes.
Ok, so, there were a couple of surprises in the end. But really I wish I'd just read a different book. I think I'm done with Scott Turow... even though he resembles my father in his youth.

tTurow draws characters in such detail that their actions are understandable, though here I submit not common to the reader’s experience. The novel paints the events with such realism the work mimics true crime, blurring into the inexplicable realm of real life.
tIn ambitious fashion, Turow captures a generation. The Law of Our Fathers would be more aptly titled the sins of our fathers. In their zeal to denounce the evils of their predecessors, they destroy prior institutions without doing the hard work of building new ones. While conceding their movement failed on a micro-level, somehow Turow clings without explanation or adequate argument to the notion every macro success from the civil rights movement to the rise of Mandela is due to flower power.
tDespite his affinity for the sixties culture, it presents as selfish, decadent, and impractical on every level. Beyond all the philosophical asides, the reader discovers a mystery crafted by one of the best. Be warned like his other novels, Turow relies on foul language and sex as tools necessary to craft his characters.
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Overwrought, overlong, disjointed, indulgent and meandering, and too drunk on its own self-importance to realize it's just a dressed-up law romance about the typical 90's characters (think: the family from American Beauty, where there's nothing really wrong in their lives but their ~ feeeeeeeeeeeeelings are oh so wound up and oh there's so much drama and oh things are so hard and complex and oh no one really loves them which makes it hard for them to love themselves which makes it hard for other people to love them which makes it hard for them to love themselves and on and on).

I didn't hate the book while I was reading it, but I will definitely have forgotten everything about it in three months except for all the parts I hated.

Have been reading Turow's novels since I did not read any of them before. Until this one they were interesting if a little over written. "Laws" was just too long for so little basic plot. The court case was dull, but still much too complicated to care about. Halfway through the book, I. starting skipping the sections from the 60's and 70's, figuring it would be explained in the end. And it was. Overall, too long and too dull.

This was not the usual elevated legal thriller that we expect from Scott Turow, but rather an exploration of history and social conditions in America, concentrating on the plight of African Americans and the multigenerational effects of the Holocaust. To this retired, middle class Canadian, the description of the stresses of black ghetto life, were particularly vivid and enlightening. The backstory of student life during the Vietnam war fascinated me as well since I am a baby boomer who knew several American draft evaders at university. If you are not of my generation, I can see how you would not appreciate this backstory as much as I do, but I urge you to work your way through it simply for the history lesson. There is also the story of an unusual but great romance in this book, which helps bring healing to the main characters.

Being a huge fan of the legal thriller genre, and after the brilliance of Presumed Innocent, I dived into the Kindle County series with much anticipation.
I must say, I became more disappointed with each book thereafter.
The Laws of Our Fathers, is yet another in the series that starts with so much potential, and then drowns in too much introspection and too many descriptions of unnecessary minutiae, whilst the plot fades away and ends up being an afterthought, as the story just winds down into nothing.
Other than the courtrooms scenes with their brilliant twists and turns, the rest of book is just a painful drudge of unnecessary dialogue, needlessly convoluted emotions and pretentious social commentary.
This was definitely the last book in the serious I'll read.

I started reading this book several years ago, at a time when my life and brain were a bit scattered, and found it difficult to follow. I couldn’t stay focused. And I gave up on it. Last week I tried it again, and I’m glad I did. This is a profoundly intense, complicated, spiritual, intellectual, emotional story that gripped me and wouldn’t let go until the very last page. I will give it some space and then I’ll read it again. If I could memorize it, I would. I have read most of Scott Turow’s books and have been astonished by his tremendous skill as a writer; but this is, I think, his finest. It’s a long book. It deserves time and focus and thought. Turow’s perception of people and life – and the 60s (in America, at least) – are brilliant. They will stay with me. They fill my heart and my mind. I have learned from them, from Turow’s beautiful writing and depth of observation. And I have thoroughly enjoyed a magnificent story. I wish I could find the words to do it justice.

One has to admire Turow’s ambition in this 500+ page balancing of (or perhaps collision between) the demands of plot and characterization, an act that seemed so finely poised in his Presumed Innocent from nine years earlier. The Laws seems not to have worked so well for many, judging by some early press reviews. Characterization definitely looms large as we constantly shift between twenty-something characters flirting dangerously with social radicalism in late-’60s-early-’70s pseudo-Berzerkeley and their mid-’90s much-older-but-still-with-lots-of-psychological-work-to-do selves in some major metropolis much further east. There they collide with the far more dangerous world of Hardcore, a death-and-drug dealing kingpin from the projects (for me, the most interesting figure, who I would hope might find his way into Turow’s later novels, as characters seem to do). It takes some patience and concentration to follow the ’70s-to-’90s temporal shifts as Seth, Sonny, Eddgar (father and son), Hobie, Lucy work to figure out who they are and who they want to be—’Core, on the other hand, seems very clear on that score. The 1990s plot, intended to provide the legal thrills, intrudes often enough to keep things engaging, and eventually provides a nice twist to extricate Judge Sonny from her judicial dilemma. A sortof deus ex machina, set apart in italic, eventually intrudes to make sense of who really did what to whom (which was a bit confusing).

Turow also ambitiously throws himself into Hardcore’s world, where others might fear to tread—perhaps more in 2017 than back in the early ’90s. The author-as-ventriloquist is challenged to speak page after page in ebonics to capture the world of the ghetto. I couldn’t help but think of Moonlight and how it confronts (or makes audiences confront) realities of that world much more quietly. (If this were Marshal Zeringue’s blog “My Book, the Movie” instead of Goodreads, I’d nominate Mahershala Ali for the part of Hardcore.) But Seth’s “righteous story” (as Hobie calls it), told after Seth’s father’s funeral, a challenging “what if” fantasy tale about black and white, and Hobie’s response to it [see the chapter, “April 1, 1996”] seems no nearer resolution in 2017 than in the mid-’90s.

I wonder what African-American public intellectuals such as Gerald Early thought of the book.

I thought this was a very long audible book 20 something hours of listening. I looked at the hardcover book on my bookshelf and was amazed that it was not a lot thicker. I am torn between two and three stars. I always feel like I have to remind people of the two stars is not a negative rating but means it was OK. Goodreads really does not give a range of less than positive options. I am leaning toward two stars at the moment because I thought the conclusion was considerably less than satisfactory.

If you don’t want to relive the 1960s and 70s, You should skip this book. It really is heavy on that era and the setting is California where the era was even more dramatic. I made quite a few comments in the attached section. Somehow everything that you heard about from 1970 was supposed to have something to do with what is happening in 1995 which is the date of the trial and the mystery. But the amount of information that is presented is far too voluminous for me. I am interested in the 60s and 70s but I am not really interested in reliving it ad infinitum.

Because there is so much in this book, There are definitely aspects that appealed to me and made me think about with some nostalgia and self reference. That is part of what made the book somewhat appealing to me. But overall this book did not make me want to move this author to the top of my Readmore list.

Overall the most interesting part of this book to me is that one of the main characters is a woman judge. The time that was spent inside her head as the trial moved forward was very intriguing to me as it touched on issues both as seen by a judge and by a woman. In the same way the thought processes of various characters as they considered their personal relationships was also interesting to me. In some ways these introspective adventures of individuals is what made the book so long so I would have to say there is some plus and minus here.