William M Kunstler

Traces the life of the flamboyant lawyer who made a career of representing unpopular people and causes, including the Chicago Seven, and Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement.

The controversial lawyer looks back on his life and career, describing his most famous cases, from the Chicago Seven to the World Trade Center bombing

Like most things William Kunstler does, the poems in this collection rattle the foundations of venerable American institutions, in this case our poetry canon and our entrenched notion that institutionalized racism is a thing of the past. His blending of high seriousness of purpose with lightheartedness of tone appears effortless and masterful. This is not ivory tower stuff. It is experience lived as fully as possible and only then recast in lyric form. Kunstler knew most of the people he writes about. A good number of those who live on in these pages had him as their only defender, some ke kept out of prison, others from the electric chair. In many ways, this book is Kunstler's true autobiography. Reading the sonnet and accompanying prose paragraph on Dr. Martin Luther Kings, Jr., for example, we learn all we need to know about the bond between Kunstler and the younger clergyman, and the seven years they worked together. And from the sonnet and commentary on Morton Stavis we grasp how deeply Kunstler feels the calling of his profession, by his anguish at the loss of his attorney friend who had for many years defended him in the courts.

Factual account, based in part on new evidence, of the still unsolved murder case of Rev. Edward Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills which occurred in New Jersey in 1922.

More than any other black leader, H. Rap Brown, chairman of the radical Black Power organization Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), came to symbolize the ideology of black revolution. This autobiography—which was first published in 1969, went through seven printings and has long been unavailable—chronicles the making of a revolutionary. It is much more than a personal history, however; it is a call to arms, an urgent message to the black community to be the vanguard force in the struggle of oppressed people. Forthright, sardonic, and shocking, this book is not only illuminating and dynamic but also a vitally important document that is essential to understanding the upheavals of the late 1960s. University of Massachusetts professor Ekwueme Michael Thelwell has updated this edition, covering Brown's decades of harassment by law enforcement agencies, his extraordinary transformation into an important Muslim leader, and his sensational trial.

This gathering of essays by the maverick social observer Bruce Jackson will stir memories, give insights, and provoke strong reactions. Selections range freely over a wide spectrum of American social conditions, public policy, and crime and punishment issues from the mid-1960s to the present. The essays remain remarkably fresh and crucially central to issues in contemporary American society. They will appeal to the general reader as well as to readers with more specialized interests in the criminal justice system and social policy.

The defense attorney in such cases as the Chicago Seven, the World Trade Center bombing, the Central Park jogger case, and the flag-burning case, William Kunstler tells his story.

Crossing over the Line describes the folly of the Mann Act of 1910—a United States law which made travel from one state to another by a man and a woman with the intent of committing an immoral act a major crime. Spawned by a national wave of "white slave trade" hysteria, the Act was created by the Congress of the United States as a weapon against forced prostitution. This book is the first history of the Mann Act's often bizarre career, from its passage to the amendment that finally laid it low. In David J. Langum's hands, the story of the Act becomes an entertaining cautionary tale about the folly of legislating private morality. Langum recounts the colorful details of numerous court cases to show how enforcement of the Act mirrored changes in America's social attitudes. Federal prosecutors became masters in the selective use of the Act: against political opponents of the government, like Charlie Chaplin; against individuals who eluded other criminal charges, like the Capone mobster "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn; and against black men, like singer Chuck Berry and boxer Jack Johnson, who dared to consort with white women. The Act engendered a thriving blackmail industry and was used by women like Frank Lloyd Wright's wife to extort favorable divorce settlements. "Crossing over the Line is a work of scholarship as wrought by a civil libertarian, and the text . . . sizzles with the passion of an ardent believer in real liberty under reasonable laws."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times