it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Tocqueville’s America and Ours. It begins:
On April 23, 1794, Chretien Guillaume De Lamoignon De Malesherbes, better known as Lamoignon-Malesherbes, seventy-three years old, counsel to Louis XVI in the trial that condemned the king to death, watched helplessly while his daughter, his son-in-law, and all their children were, one by one, guillotined in front of a howling mob of Parisians. Only then was he allowed to meet his own death by the same method. Not all of his grandchildren were murdered; one of them survived to become the mother of Alexis Henri Charles Maurice Clerel,Visit D.W. Buffa's website.Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy In America, the most important book on American democracy ever written. The French Revolution made the equal rights of every one a new religion and made democracy the only legitimate form of government. Everyone was equal, no one was more important than anyone else; everything had to be decided by the majority, whatever the effect on the rights of the minority. The problem was how to prevent a majority, made up almost always of the ignorant and the poor, from following someone who appealed to their sense of grievance and resentment, their demand that those above them should be brought down to their own level? How, in other words, protect against the “democratic despotism” Tocqueville considered the greatest threat to liberty the world had ever seen? He thought he might find the answer in America.
The America Tocqueville discovered in the 1830s bears a striking, and sometimes almost eerie, resemblance to the America of the present day. Change the name of the president we have now and Tocqueville becomes a contemporary writer...[read on]
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
