Protect And Defend - Softcover

Patterson, Richard North

4.04

4,383 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091794080 ISBN 13: 9780091794088

Publisher: Hutchinson, 2001

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The young woman is Mary Ann Tierney. She is 15 years old. Within days her name will be known to millions acrosss America, her court case a television must-watch for everyone from the President downwards. s Mary Ann takes on her own parents and the constitional law of the United States in a desperate bid to protect her future right to bear children, the ramifications of the 'Tierney' case bring a threat to the new President, Kerry Kilcannon, to his nominee for Chief Justice, Caroline Masters, and to his main rival for the Presidency, Senator Chad Palmer. All have dangerous secrets in their past, secrets that would not only threaten careers, but bring death and tragedy to innocent lives. A tense, moving account of the tangled moral issues at the heart of the most difficult decision a woman has to take. It plays out the terrible consequences when the media takes people's private lives and turns them into public entertainment.

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Protect and Defend

Review:

Richard North Patterson's excellent Protect and Defend is both courtroom drama and political nail-biter; if politics is the art of the possible, just how far is it legitimate to go in a cause which you think of as good? A 15-year-old, pregnant with a seriously disabled child delivering which alive will prevent her having further children; parents so adamantly opposed to abortion that they will refuse consent to what she wants--this is the minefield into which idealistic lawyer Sarah walks knowing that she has found the hard case to discredit a bad law. Her former mentor Caroline is up for promotion to Chief Justice--and Sarah's test case becomes the litmus paper by which an entire political culture brings itself to judgement... Patterson forces us to consider the entire question of the private, the personal and the political--no one from Democrat President to Republican candidate has entirely clean hands, but just how intrusive is the process of scrutiny allowed to be? Patterson writes as an insider--his acknowledgements list includes two US Presidents--but his sense of the law and of the political process is balanced by compassion for those conscripted into the public eye by circumstances not ambition. --Roz Kaveney

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