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"The turbulent true story of a first year at Harvard Law School," as my copy's cover blurb has it. Having spent time teaching creative writing, the author finds himself entering law school in 1975, a little later than most of his age cohort. The book was written immediately after his first year and published in 1977 (and has remained in print ever since, I believe), so, as he says, it's a look at the first-year law school experience that is raw and unmellowed by time. At Harvard, he finds a high standard of excellence, arrogant professors, "a kind of divine faith in the place and its inhabitants," grade-obsessed students, a high degree of competitiveness, and constant anxiety. Studying law, forming study groups, and talking about classes take up literally all his waking hours.

I'd say that this is one of the best memoirs of its kind. It shows how a neophyte to the law begins to approach the abstruse and practically foreign language of the legal code, and only through assiduous toil does he come to gradually understand it. But beyond the nuts and bolts of a legal education, Turow discusses how Harvard Law School succeeds and fails. He wants answers to bigger questions about ethics, the paradoxes of the law, about money and values, and feels his education comes up short. He worries he and his fellow students are being taught to be test-takers and memorizers rather than attorneys who work to represent people. He also describes in brutal honesty the toll it took on his health, mind, and marriage. He was told that Harvard Law School was where he would "meet his enemy," and it turns out he does, and his enemy is the grade-grubbing, advantage-taking person he would rather not be. At the end his call for a change in how law is taught is eloquent and even moving; but not being in that world, I have no idea if any of the changes came to be. One amusing thing to note is the prices, which Turow notes with some alarm; they're positively charming now. At one point he notes that he spent nearly one hundred dollars on extra books!