The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America - Hardcover

Barrett, Paul M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525943447 ISBN 13: 9780525943440

Publisher: E P Dutton, 1999

Synopsis

Follows the personal story of an African-American lawyer who rose from a Queens housing project to obtain a Harvard education and career in corporate law only to encounter the devastating setback of racial discrimination. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

"Superb and provocative... It will rivet anyone wondering why the struggle to racially integrate Corporate America has made such scant progress."--David Segal, Washington Post

"Like Grisham, Barrett has a knack for writing dramatically about lawyers and their world. What haunts this reader is the sadness of a man who spent his life trying to be 'a good black.'"--Newsweek

"An emotional roller coaster... Should serve as a wake-up call for those who have ignored the wide gulf between blacks and whites in the American workforce."--Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People and Member of the Club

"Barrett has written a fascinating racial Rashomon story. With unusual empathy and evenhandedness, Barrett illuminates the complicated workings of race in a middle-class, post-civil rights society--while at the same time spinning an absorbing courtroom yarn."--Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land

"A morality tale with a twist... Has the power to unsettle us and our self-congratulatory expectations."--Denver Post

"A remarkably clear portrait... part case comment, part biography, and part snapshot of race relations at the end of the twentieth century."--Harvard magazine

"Powerful and poignant."--David J. Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross

"Raises all the right questions... paints an intimate picture... illustrates one of the modern-day iterations of the debate about race."--Chicago Tribune

"An important story... No one who cares about the future of black-white relations in this country can afford to ignore its lessons."--Charles Lane, editor, The New Republic

"The Good Black really is The Firm... Illuminates not only the avarice at the core of modern law practice but the never-ending ambiguities of race."--Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson

From the Back Cover:

In this eloquent and suspenseful work of nonfiction, Paul M. Barrett goes into the minefields of corporate America and inside our legal system to tell the story of one man's journey across racial lines.

Taught to believe that he was "a human being first, an American second, and a black third", Larry Mungin grew up with the credo that if you played by the rules, you'd succeed. His pursuit of the American Dream took him from a Queens housing project to Harvard Law School to the Washington, D.C., office of Katten Muchin & Zavis, a blue-chip Chicago law firm, where he worked toward achieving a coveted partnership.

It didn't happen. In the fall of 1994, brushed off by senior partners who weren't even considering him for partnership, Mungin hired an upstart black firm to sue his employer. Katten Muchin & Zavis retaliated by mounting the best defense money could buy. The jury's verdict made headlines from coast to coast; the final ruling on appeal was even more startling.

Was Mungin a victim of racial discrimination, business-as-usual mismanagement, or changes in the legal marketplace? At once a gripping courtroom drama and an intimate account of the forces that drove one man to risk everything for his ideals, The Good Black challenges us to make up our own minds and to see in Larry Mungin's story the deeper, far-reaching implications of racial discrimination in our time.

About this edition

• Publisher: E P Dutton
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0525943447
• ISBN 13: 9780525943440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296