Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell

(Doubleday, $32.50)

For “histrionics and sheer volume of spectacular cases,” it’s hard to find a lawyer’s career that tops Clarence Darrow’s, said Gary Delsohn in the San Francisco Chronicle. Across five decades, beginning in the 1890s, Darrow argued in more “trials of the century” than virtually any other American litigator. Today, he is perhaps most widely admired for his “eloquent and angry defense of ordinary laborers” and for his famous defense of Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes, who was convicted of teaching evolution. But as Boston Globe editor John A. Farrell argues in his “impeccably researched” new biography, the legend of Darrow as a progressive crusader sanitizes a fairly checkered career—one that includes the bribery of two jurors in one of his biggest cases.

Farrell’s Darrow is certainly more mercenary than the one immortalized by textbooks and Hollywood, said Kevin Boyle in The New York Times. Legal ethics mattered less to Darrow than winning or the promise of a big payday. His clients ran the gamut of notoriety, and included most infamously Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who killed a child just to see if they could get away with it. Darrow “shamelessly seduced juries with his common-man routine,” and when he couldn’t get the testimony he needed, he bought it. Or so Farrell asserts he did in the case of the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building.

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Farrell’s refusal to “tidy up Darrow’s character” is undoubtedly refreshing, said Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times. As a man and a lawyer, Darrow certainly was no saint. But as Farrell’s “clear-sighted” biography points out, along with Darrow’s questionable traits came plenty of good. Though this brilliant showman was shameless about doing whatever it took to win on behalf of his clients, he seemed also to have remained true to his own faith that the longer and larger battle was against injustice and hate. Farrell doesn’t need to hide Darrow’s true character: “He knows he has a protagonist of Shakespearean richness and complexity.” That’s the character he’s brought to the page.