![]() ![]() Stern is an old man now, an 85-year-old shouldering the heavy memories of his two wives, Clara, the mother of his children, dead by her own hand in 1989, and Helen, gone only two years the physical toll of years of fighting cancer and a recent car crash which necessitated brain surgery and the strenuous duties of the courtroom.Īs Stern falls asleep one night, Turow writes, he thinks about how "vitality drains away so slowly that there is really no noticing, and yet he feels he has experienced no dimming of the fundamental feeling of being alive. Though he turned 71 last month and by all appearances is trim and fit, Turow through his characters has much to say about getting older. One focus here is mortality and the ravages of age. ![]() As literate and smart as anyone in the writing biz, he is not given to fancy literary flourishes but rather devotes his considerable gifts to deep insights about the failings of the flesh. One of the admirable aspects of Turow's work is that he is no showoff. A Nobel Prize winner in medicine for his work on a cancer drug called g-Livia, Pafko stands accused of insider trading through research data manipulation and causing the death of multiple patients who participated in the drug studies. Like Stern, Pafko is old and an emigre from Argentina. Whatever the case, it is good to have Stern back for a last hurrah, handling the defense of his longtime friend Dr. Some fictional characters take on a life of their own and seem to speak and behave as if flesh and blood. It is often hard for some writers to abandon characters, dump them in a trash can. (Turow is a child of the northern suburbs and currently lives in Evanston.) The next novel, "The Burden of Proof," also featured Stern and you'll find him in roles large and small in most all of Turow's novels, notably those set in his fictional Kindle County, which bears an unmistakable, welcome resemblance to Chicago and the county of Cook. ![]() He was created to defend Rusty Sabich, the prosecutor accused of committing a murder in a case he is overseeing. He first appeared in 1987's novel, "Presumed Innocent," the book that not only launched Turow's career as a novelist but virtually created the genre now known as the "legal thriller." You may remember Stern from most of Turow's previous books. His latest sure-to-be-a-bestseller-and-likely-to-be-a-movie-too novel is "The Last Trial" (Grand Central Publishing), featuring that familiar legal mind of Alejandro "Sandy" Stern. If you have ever been in an actual courtroom observing a trial, you know that courtrooms can be - please forget the truncated fireworks of "Law & Order," "A Few Good Men" or most any other television or movie legal drama - filled with words so redundant as to drive you to work crossword puzzles during the proceedings.īut Turow, a lawyer by trade and passion that is ongoing - he works pro bono and has focused for years on wrongful convictions and capital punishment reform - makes the most complicated legal matters understandable and even exciting. Spending time with Scott Turow, as rewarding and entertaining as that has been over the years, means spending a great deal of time in courtrooms.
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