As usual the book is better than the movie. Having seen the movie first, I hesitated reading this legal thriller about a woman who is a Harvard law professor and a highly regarded defense attorney who defends her husband in a military trial. He is accused of killing 87 unarmed civilians in San Salvador thirteen years previous. He had been living with wife Claire Heller Chapman as Tom Chapman, a new identity for this Special Forces soldier named Ronald Kubik.

Claire is shocked and overwhelmed when he is arrested and charged. After realizing he will be convicted quickly in a military court, she decides to apply her skill as a gifted defense attorney and defend him. She must learn the nuances of military jurisprudence, so she hires ex-JAG attorney, Charles O. Grimes III ( Morgan Freeman in the movie).

Claire wants desperately to believe her husband is not a killer, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As the evidence is presented, she raises creative challenges that would normally cause reasonable doubt in a civilian jury. However, the judge doesn't give her any favorable rulings and Claire realizes she is working against a stacked deck. This realization helps extinguish any lingering doubt that something is wrong and convinces her of Tom's professed innocence.

This multi-layered plot helped erase my own doubt about the time I spent reading a story of which I already knew the outcome. There is enough difference in the storyline as well as in the complexity of the plot that I was actually unsure if the book would end in the same way as the movie. There is enough difference to recommend the book for both those who have seen the movie and those who haven't to find out how it ends. I think you will be pleasantly satisfied.

I just got the book from Amazon yesterday and finished it this morning in one sitting. It's really, really great. I hardly ever read thrillers but this one for some reason just took my attention and when I started it I couldn't stop, I loved Claire and her sister Jackie and Grimes. As a working woman and a mom I totally identified with Claire and liked the way she's strong and sexy at the same time, and funny. A totally great character! I liked Tom, her husband, but then I wasn't sure, but I was rooting for them to get there happy lives back. I was totally floored at the end! Everyone who likes suspense novels, or who just likes a good story, should read this book!!

High Crimes was almost impossible to put down. Thankfully I read this book over the Thanksgiving holiday, when some serious time could be allocated to relaxing and reading. High Crimes is a fast-paced, enjoyable read from the very beginning. There is action, excitement, intrigue, and frequent plot twists. In the story itself, law professor Claire Chapman comes to defend her husband, Tom Chapman, against charges that he committed a military atrocity under a different identity while serving in the US Army. Although some of the action is predictable, confusion, uncertainty, and surprise is the general rule, thus driving the reader to want to read "just one more chapter." I strongly recommend High Crimes. It should prove to be an entertaining read. The only downside is that it will be over all to quickly.

I.J. Singer's work is a large-scale novel, with a multitude of characters and plots, the first attempt of a Yiddish writer to break away from the traditional short fiction depicting life in the shtelt. It is the result of exposure to European literature late in the 19th century, and reflects the dilemma of Jewish milieu torn apart from its traditional roots and having to face the rise of capitalism and communism. The main character, Max Ashkenazi is despicable by all means, obsessed by money and power, with a Machiavellian mind, and despite all his success has a sad end in life. Considering the conflicting time in which the novel takes place (first four decades of the 20th century), the main plot reflects the author's pessimistic and skeptic view of the place the Jew might have in modern society: be it amongst the capitalists or the communists, the Jew will always be misplaced and will never loose his stigma as scapegoat in times of trouble. The reader familiar with wthe work of Joshua's younger brother (Isaac Bashevis Singer) will certainly realize that the brothers share little in terms of literary production, each one with his own merits, albeit I.B. Singer surpasses in magnitude and depth.

The story begins at the beginning, prior to the nearly simultaneous birth of two brothers. Not quite Cain and Abel, the brothers grow apart and together, mixing people,places,positions. With verve and breadth, it tells how each individual becomes his own choices, with the help and the hindrance of the Jewish community in Poland in the early 20th century. What a story!

This book is an amazing piece of work. You can really see the struggles that the Jewish population in Poland had to endure in the decades before WWII. Some of the characters are truly detestable at, other times they are to be pitied. All in all, a very tragic book.

This is the central question explored by Conrad in Lord Jim. Jim is ultimately a character who inspires our sympathy due to his inability to find reconcilliation for his one tragic moment of weakness. In him we find a person of tremendous potential that remains unrealized as the tragic circumstances of his abandoning his post aboard the Patna continually haunt him and the associated guilt drives him to isolation.
Conrad successfully explores the concepts of bravery, cowardice,guilt and the alternative destinies that an individual may be driven to by these qualities.
The narrative can be a bit confusing at times as Marlowe relates the tale by recalling his encounters with Jim. The book reminded very much of Somerset Maugham's THE RAZOR"S EDGE" in style. However I believe that Maugham did a much better job of incorporating the narrator into the flow of the story. Overall LORD JIM is a wonderful classic novel that I highly recommend.

This is the fifth book I have read by Conrad, and through these readings I have come to deeply appreciate his literary power and the perfection of his stories. Conrad has the skill to border about several similar subjects, without repeating himself. "Lord Jim" is truly a Shakespearean tragedy, mainly because of the Shakespearean nature of the main character. Jim is a young naval officer with high hopes of heroism and moral superiority, but when he faces his first test of courage, he miserably fails. While 800 Muslim pilgrims are asleep aboard the ship "Patna", Jim discovers that the boat is about to sink. There are not sufficient lifeboats for everybody. Should he wake them up or not? He gets paralyzed with fear and then sudenly jumps into a boat being set up by the rest of the officers. He is taken to trial and disposessed of his working licence.

Ashamed and humiliated, Jim dedicates the rest of his life to two things: escape the memory of that fateful night, and redeem himself. This agonizing quest to recover his dignity in front of his own eyes leads him to hide in a very remote point in the Malayan peninsula, where he will become the hero, the strong man, the wise protector of underdeveloped, humble and ignorant people. Jim finds not only the love of his people, but also the love of a woman who admires him and fears the day when he might leave for good. The narrator, Captain Marlow (the same of "Heart of Darkness") talks to Jim for the last time in his remote refuge, and then Jim tells him that he has redeemed himself by becoming the people's protector. Oh, but these things are never easy and Jim will face again the specter of failure.

Conrad has achieved a great thing by transforming the "novel of adventures" into the setting for profound and interesting reflections on the moral stature of Man, on courage, guilt, responsibility, and redemption.

Just as in "Heart of Darkness" the question is what kinds of beings we are stripped of cultural, moral and religious conventions; just as in "Nostromo" the trustworthiness of a supposedly honest man is tested by temptation, in "Lord Jim" the central subject is dignity and redemption after failure.

A great book by one of the best writers.

After reading this book (along with several other of Conrad's books) I am under the impression that Joseph Conrad may very well be my favorite author. Here is another masterpiece, a deeply incisive study of character of the motivation and the ultimate failure of all high-minded ideals. Granted my own personal world view falls directly in line with this realization and therefore prejudices me towards anything the man might write, but, when considering such a lofty title as 'favorite author' one must regard other aspects of the novelist's creation. As with the others, Conrad wins by the power of his stories.

Lord Jim is my least favorite of the the four books I have read by Conrad. The story is rather scattered: a righteous young man does something wrong that he holds himself far too accountable for and the public shame the action brought him exaggerates the reality of his failure and makes him believe the rumors swirling around about his so-called cowardice. He spends the remainder of his life trying to reclaim his self-regard, mostly exaggerating his own importance in matters he hardly understands. His goal is to liberate the primitive people of the jungle paradise he inadvertantly finds himself in (due to an effort to escape every particle of the world he once inhabited) and his once high-minded ideals and regard for himself lead him to allow those people to consider him almost a God.

Jim likes being a God and considers himself a just and fair one. He treats everyone equally and gives to his people the knowledge of modern science and medicine as well as the everyday archetecture and understanding of trade that those primitive folks would otherwise be years from comprehending.

Of course everything ends in failure and misery and of course Jim's restored name will be returned to its demonic status, but the whole point of the novel seems to me that one can not escape their past. Jim, for all his courage in the line of fire has tried to avoid all memory of the once shameful act of his former life and by doing so becomes destined to repeat his mistakes.

Lord Jim is far more expansive than the story it sets out to tell, ultimately giving a warning on the nature of history and general humanity that only a writer of Conrad's statue could hope to help us understand.

If there is a flaw it is not one to be taken literally. Conrad was a master of structural experimentation and with Lord Jim he starts with a standard third person narrative to relate the background and personalities of his characters and then somehow merges this into a second person narrative of a man, years from the events he is relating, telling of the legend of Jim. It is a brilliant innovation that starts off a little awkward and might lead to confusion in spots as the story verges into its most important parts under the uncertain guidence of a narrator who, for all his insight into others, seems unwilling to relate his personal relevence to the story he is relating.

Nevertheless (with a heartfelt refrain), one of the best books I have ever read.

This is an exemplary example of NOT judging a book by it's cover. The back of the book insist this is "a hilarious and chilling.......playground for the rich, ...brilliantly suspenseful.."ad nauseum. First I couldn't keep the characters straight because one of the protagonists was a detective named Lynn Cutter. I thought it was a female, which threw me really off track when MR. Cutter gives private investigator Breda Burrows a long look at her blue eyes and long legs. MR. Cutter is a policeman, but one who is hoping he will get into no more trouble until his pension comes through in a matter of months. Along stumbles (literally) Ms. Breda Burrows, a strong woman, but desperately in need of someone with a badge to help her solve the mystery of a rich woman who believes her husband is philandering by giving sperm to a sperm bank. My sympathies and sense of humor lie with Mr. Cutter, who is really a very funny character and brings life into this incredibly boring story. As Breda's guide they must wander through the glazed world of Palm Springs, where they will encounter oddities that don't fit, bodies that shouldn't be dead and loads of money. This book is not captivating enough, even with Mr. Cutter as a lively character to warrant one star.

Sure, the plot lines are more than a little strange, and I do not mean strange in a good way, but has no one else noticed how unbelievably CLUMSY this book is? I kept reading because one of the plot lines (the more serious one--with the bald fugitive) dragged me along. But it was doggone hard to deal with the style. Maybe I should say lack of style, unless a surfeit of exclamation points counts as "style." I've read Wambaugh's nonfiction in the past, and I've never found it to be particularly ineptly written. Maybe I stumbled on books he spent some time polishing, I dunno. But this book is a wreck. There isn't a graceful descriptive sentence in it, and the dialogue is almost unbearable. Even if it had been well-written, it would be pretty hard to enjoy a book where the dog is the only truly appealing character.

Lynn Cutter wants only to drink away the days in gorgeous Palm Springs while waiting on the possible arrival of his hoped for disability pension check. When smart, tough, sexy ex-cop turned P.I. Breda Burrows enlists his assistance for a case that she's working on, he agrees to help, against his better judgment. At first the case seems simple enough, socialite Rhonda Devon wants to know why her older husband has been to a sperm bank without her knowledge. Breda figures she can do surveillance on hubby while Lynn uses his police badge to ask some questions and open some doors for her. However, when Devon's husband is spotted meeting a mysterious man who's previously attacked a cop at an airport, then the focus of their case becomes as much about this mysterious "fugitive" as it is about wandering husbands and spousal secrets. Enter a young cop who is way too gung ho for his and everyone else's good, and you have the makings of a typical Wambaugh at his best story. Humor, laced with deadly violence, a mystery that's not exactly what it seems, and characters that grow on you in spite of (or perhaps because of) their faults and foibles.

All of Wambaugh's works tend to be both tragic and funny at the same time, and this one is no exception. However I would rate it as one of his better comic mysteries, using comedy in the old Greek sense of the opposite of tragedy. To tell more would spoil the ending of the book, but I would actually place this book with his less tragic works, such as FINNEGAN'S WEEK, or THE DELTA STAR, and less so with his more tragic tales, like THE SECRETS OF HARRY BRIGHT. Since I'm one of those who enjoys Wambaugh when he's not as much in the dark side of life, this is one of my favorites. Experienced Wambaugh readers should know what I'm talking about here, but I would easily recommend this book to anyone who likes a good mystery, be they long time Wambaugh fans or not. A five-star rating for suspense, a compelling story, sympathetic characters, and a fun read.