Prestige and honor: the legal life of Michael Tigar
Times Literary Supplement | 1st November 2021
In 1920, Clarence Darrow, America’s great “defender of the damned”, told a Chicago jury, in defence of freedom of speech: “You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free”. Michael Tigar, in this account of his fifty years of legal practice, does not quote Darrow’s famous maxim, but he has surely lived by it. After graduating first in his class at the University of California Berkeley School of Law in 1966, he embarked on a legal odyssey to defend victims of state persecution, from the free speech activists at Berkeley to the Chagos islanders displaced to make way for the American naval base on Diego Garcia. On the way, he represented nearly every American dissident whose name appeared on the FBI and CIA wanted lists. Despite the injustices Tigar witnessed, he retains his faith in…
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Anything Can Happen
The New York Review of Books
Notions of authorship, creator, and creatures, as well as of love, folly, and imagination, dominate Salman Rushdie’s and Ariel Dorfman’s retellings of Don Quixote. I don’t think I understand what Don Quixote is about, and I don’t think anybody knows…
Hush-Hush Boom-Boom
London Review of Books
Alexander Cockburn blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no…
Ruling Assange Can’t Be Extradited Is an Indictment of US Prisons
The Nation
But the British court judgment, which is likely to be appealed, also delivers a body blow to freedom of speech. My junior year high school English teacher liked to tell a story about Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson…
Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.