Without Reservation : How a Controversial Indian Tribe Rose to Power and Built the World's Largest Casino
 |
Author:Jeff Benedict
Release Date:1/7/2001
Reviews:16
Scroll down to read reviews
Click here to See
more about this at Amazon |
Rating: 3 How the world really works All Reviews
The end of the jacket blurb describes this book: "As compelling as a novel, _Without Reservation is must reading for anyone interested in the way today's world _really_ works."
This is a fair description. It does have the characterization, the pacing and the storytelling of a novel. This is "compelling" at its best but sometimes seems silly and superficial. The most fascinating thing is indeed the insight into how the world works and one does not need a particular interest in gambling or Native Americans to appreciate it. We see how lawyers can revolutionize the world through close reading, discovering new powers in old books while at the same time it becomes clear that elected officials have no time for or interest in reading the legislation that they implement. The book traces the rise of Skip Hayward, founder and chief of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe. Hayward often appears in the worst light, especially in the chapters on his first marriage (he was really awful to his wife). But he is also a man of charisma and vision. He organizes a tribe that was long thought extinct and creates a billion dollar business. The irony is that the get-rich scheme that is finally successful for Hayward is based on the work of three extremely idealistic people: John Stevens, leader of the impoverished Passamaquoddy tribe of Maine; Tom Tureen, a Princeton educated public service lawyer; and Susan MacCulloch, Stevens's wife and an anthropologist who is a leading expert on the Indian tribes of the East. Together they discover how to gain legal recognition and compensation for tribes that were swallowed up in the original 13 colonies. They approach Hayward and make all his future success possible.
I really enjoyed this book and was gripped by the story, but it is badly in need of editing, at least in the hardcover first edition that I read. There are repeated misuses of homophones and the author has a problem with numbers. A person is described as in her twenties in 1970 when the next page gives her birthdate as 1934. At one point he explains that the Supreme Court takes "less than 5 percent" of the cases submitted from lower courts and "[t]he other 95 percent are turned away." On the next page the odds of the court taking the case "were no better than one in ninety-five." Either figure is plausible but they are not the same. However, this is a book about the power of lawyers, and the author took his own lesson: he wrote the book while finishing his law degree. |
|
