The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

The next book on my trip through my John Grisham shelf of my Bookcase is The Street Lawyer. I know a lot of people will be thinking I only have Grisham books on my shelf and it certainly seems that way to me. His books make up just under half of my collection of fiction works and although one of his recent works didn’t fill me with the same desire to read, the older ones such as this certainly did. Grisham, a former lawyer has made a very ...
...he writes his books on the subject he is familiar with keeping a law theme within almost all of his works to date. His knowledge of the criminal system obviously helps a lot in explaining exactly what he means in an easy way so that someone like me, with only basic knowledge of legal proceedings can follow easily. The main character is Michael Brook, a young lawyer with one of Washington DC’s top law firms, Sweeney & Drake who graduated from ...

Andy.mack 17.11.2003 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

The Street Lawyer John Grisham As some my regular readers (I wish…) will know, I am a John Grisham fan and am currently reading and reviewing all of his books. As with all Grisham books, this is based around the law and lawyers. The Street Lawyer, as the name suggests, deals with a lawyer who works the street. In this sense, I mean in an office helping the homeless - not ambulance chasers. The Characters John Grisham has always been good ...
...insight into every detail. By the middle of the book, you feel as if you know them. This is good as it draws the reader in and allows more emotions to be felt. E.g. sorrow when something bad happens to the 'good guy.' However, nobody is perfect and each character has another side, this is not always clear at first and so makes for a good read. Michael Brock Mike is a Yale graduate and currently working at a top law firm called Drake and Sweeney. ...

christopherj84 25.07.2001 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

The main character in this one is Michael. He is a lawyer earning a lot of money at a massive law firm in Washington, DC. However, a homeless man takes him hostage one day. He and his fellow lawyers survive the incident, but their assailant is not so lucky, killed and buried in a pauper’s grave. This shocks Michael greatly. He digs into the man's past and discovers a dirty secret, relating to the law firm where he works. The ladder that he ...
...him. He lives on the streets, becoming the eponymous street lawyer, but he is being hunted as a thief. Can he expose the law firm or is he going to jail? I have heard many people say that John Grisham is finished as a writer. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. ‘The Street Lawyer’ just proves my point. Grisham is going from strength to strength and I am certain that there will be many works more books in the works ...

LukeCroll 01.04.2001 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

...this story its power, is the way the writer forcefully brings the homeless up to the same 'level' as so-called middle and upper-class society. The lead character's apparent fall from high society to the lowly depths of street life, and the way he gradually begins to realise and accept that the homeless are human too, touches something deep inside the reader's soul. The story centres around a case involving seventeen homeless people who are wrongfully ...
...several of the evictees dying of exposure on the streets. The case is being fought, not to secure pointless millions for the dead plaintiffs, but to force society to recognise that this is happening every day in our cities, in the face of all the empty promises made by governments that it will stop. People are being tossed onto the streets by the very people promising to keep them in a warm home. We are made to feel uncomfortable that society in ...

Lucilock 03.10.2000 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

...Grisham has all but owned the best-sellers lists for the past seven years. The Street Lawyer is the one such success. Of course, such a tremendous run of success brings its own pressures, as witnessed by some of the trite passages in his last few books. Fans should be celebrating this latest offering however, as The Street Lawyer is Grisham's most complete book since The Chamber. And like The Chamber, the reason for the quality is that Grisham again ...
...the homeless. With his usual frantic pacing, Grisham rips through a story of young, successful lawyer Michael Brock, whose rapid rise through the company ranks comes to shuddering stop when a homeless man takes him and some colleagues hostage. The man is soon stopped by a police bullet, but the brief dose of danger shakes our hero from his corporate sleepwalking and plunges him into the world of the Washington D.C. homeless. As his conscience awakes, ...

Mohammed 26.07.2000 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

...changes your perception of how the world could be. As I had only ever come across multi-million selling author John Grisham as the name behind the film of his hit The Firm (and an uninspiring performance from Tom Cruise) I was not expecting great guns from this book. Michael Brock is about to undergo a life changing experience. A top attorney in firm in Washington DC, he turns up for work one day and innocently crosses the path of Mister, and homeless ...
...Michael is prompted to investigate the grudge he held against his employer, Drake and Sweeney. While the original premise may seem quite simple - even in Washington, a landlord must give a tenant 30 days notice of eviction by law - the efforts of Drake and Sweeney to cover up an illegal eviction ensure that the story does not die with Mister that day in their plush office. What gives this novel a hard edge is Grisham's approach to the issue of homelessness. ...

aspebbles 26.11.2006 (13.12.2006) · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

This book opens up at the journey of a person on his way to work who is portrayed as being, a young, professional person in a fairly comfortable job with certain expectations for himself, life and society. On entering his workplace, he finds himself accompanied in the lift, by a foul-smelling black person who looks entirely out of his element because of his apparent lack of money, that which the main character seem to ooze with such implied ease. ...
...us to assume that the protagonist is probably white. These might appear small, trivial aspects of the book, but the concept of oppression looms larger further on in the book, as it points to comparative scales of oppression among classes, races, and social standing in modern day America. It turns out that the foul smelling person, a man who later accepts the term of "Mister" as a name, has planned to blow up all the main partners in the legal firm ...

Whizzdom 10.11.2007 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

...as a way of focussing the public's attention to the problems of the homeless in the United States. My attention was not captured by the story, the characters were fascinating as ever but all through the book I kept waiting for the excitement Grisham usually creates in his books. But that did not happen. From the end of the story, which seemed to be written in great haste, I gathered that it was more important to the writer to attract attention to ...

mrighart 29.07.2000 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

...up John Grisham novels on the fly, running past the book shop at the airport and so on. So far I have never regretted my choice and this is no exception. As to the plot: Mike is a successful lawyer, one of those who works all the hours God sends, with a withering marriage, when he is held up at gun point in his office. The subsequent emotions he feels and the discoveries he makes about the homeless man who had the gun, lead him to leave this expensive ...
...with the people who live on the streets. He takes an enormous cut in salary, loses his wife and moves to a very dodgy apartment. For me the most interesting part of the book is the voyage of self dicovery that this typical American success story embarks on. Most lawyers in America work for the money but Mike seems to discover the real reason he became a lawyer when he begins to delve into the reasons why this homeless man,"Mister", saw fit to enter ...

katzen 11.10.2003 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

I was very disappointed with The Street Lawyer. There's a reason why people read a specific author, and getting a moral lesson about the homeless is not why I read Grisham. Yes, he tried something new and even succeeded, but it might just put readers off from reading his next novel. Grisham is known for his exciting plots and intricate characters. The Street Lawyer has it's moments, and the reader do get involved with the main character, but it's ...

neofran 06.08.2000 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

Michael is climbing up the ladder at Drake & Sweeney fast. D & S is a giant D. C. firm with more than 800 lawyers. Michael has everything but lacks time for himself due to long working hours. His partner, a doctor, was also moving fast on her track. While Michael was on his way home he encountered a homeless man. It was something common but Michael got curious and dug a little deeper about the man's history. The old man's poverty and homeless for ...

joemal 07.08.2008 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

The Street Lawyer is a bit different from the usual Grisham fare. Michael Brock, the main character, has a vagrant come into his offices and hold some of the lawyers in an office. Michael looks into the grivance the vagrant had and discovers that his firm were behind him getting evicted. Michael starts to help the homeless and risks everything he has. The impression I got when i read this book was that Grisham had possibly had an experience with ...

tommy7 12.07.2000 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham

The Street Lawyer is a good example of Grisham's style. He seems intent on the view that a lawyer can save the world 'case by case' as he puts it. I agreee with others who say this book reads like a moral lesson. But you have to say that this is the case with most Grisham books. They are page-turners, but the story lines are mainly based around corporate greed and 'dark secrets'. In fact I wonder what Grisham will do when he runs out of ideas for ...

anotherwiseguy 18.12.2000 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: somewhat helpful
Review of The Street Lawyer - John Grisham